El Konki duet, compuesto por Kumi, Tam, and Zoe, es un trío franco-ruso-japonés, y se ve de su interpretación liberal de la palabra duet que son tan chistosas como son melancólicas. Mezclan guitarras, teclado, violín y percusión con elementos electrónicas. El resultado oscila melódicamente entre lo dulce-triste y lo dulce-cómico. Su debut Il Fait Tout son doce canciones cantadas en francés y japonés, respiradas con una tristeza pacifica y una alegría riot-girl. En su cadena de influencias se escucha sombras de Blonde Redhead, Animal Collective, música concreta, baladas, la música clásica y el pop de los años setenta japonés. Según su pagina web, también les gusta comer chocolate, beber champán, ver a la televisión y disfrutan del sexo con sus amigos.
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trans-pacific transit, tatuaje y todo lo demás
15.4.08
digging up the buried treasure
You Mean You Don't Know? circa 2001....
Call it screamcore, Appalachia-no!, porno-pop, rock-a-bully– IN[outré]DIE sounds like the Wedding Present was a Promise Ring, or, more accurately, Granddaddy met the Danielson Family at a reunion for Los Desaparecidos. This genre-bending gang of four from Tuscaloosa skillfully melds earily [sic] screeching vocals with whisper-soft choirboy harmonies, the pounding beats of drum and bass with mournful fiddle dirges to create dense summerscapes. Their brilliant use of the Würlitzer on the track "Ego-Blossom" calls up to heaven’s pond, where Walden, perhaps this identity-exploring band’s precedent, sits lotus-style picking his toe lint. Spiky glock work is backed up by drummer Lila’s emotive yelp, and contrasted with a looped sample of a thousand lockers slamming shut, presumably with the song’s alienated heroine inside.
No, I didn’t lift this from my guilty morning coffee perusals of pitchforkmedia.com–though they expend nearly this much hyperbolic energy to describe bands that sound more like "Simon and Carbuncle coffee Klatching with Kurt" than anything as exciting as screamcore. And what is screamcore, you ask? My frustrated wail at the baseball-card mentality that indie seems to foist upon the average arty collegiate and shameless inability to untangle myself from it. Chamber-pop, slowcore, shoegazer, kindercore, IDM–there is a genre for every moment, mood, and type of kidskin tennis shoe, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of the music we listen to is well, pop. But it’s new and different–yeah, exactly–indie rock turns obscurity, quirk, and cleverness into social currency the same way Seventeen turns Britney’s recipe for tuna casserole into news.
I'm not saying that commercial music is good, or indie is bad; I’m saying the attitude of superiority that "indie" as a posture assumes assures that the music works much the same way that any other pop does, albeit on a smaller scale. It hawks a different set of values, but the goal of the average pinback purchaser isn’t really that different than the goal of a James Taylor greatest hits album. A lot of indie music adds disillusionment and alienation to the basic formulas of summer nights; youth; love; carefree; wistful road trips; and city loneliness, but barely tinkers with four-chord structure. How could it, what with my expectation of four fresh reviews every morning? Groundbreaking greatness just doesn’t occur as frequently as Magnet would have us believe.
Nothing wrong with four-chord structure there–I mean, we all need a stable ground from which to grow into grad students and copywriters. But is it really necessary to buy in, read reviews, chatter, and laugh at anybody who doesn’t know the complete oeuvre of Television, and bitch that somewhere in Middle America, Bjork, Radiohead, and The White Stripes are sharing CD-changer space with Linkin Biscuit and Limp Pork to maintain our self-respect as good glasses-wearing Dec readers? And if what we want is pop, do we have to discuss the musical subtlety of Tortoise and Autechre?
I’ll admit it smarted a bit when it was announced that The Faint was touring with No Doubt–I mean, their slippery-synth-kraftwerky mix had resulted in three broken lamps, a shattered mirror in my living room, and the death of my last wine glass. Then the caffeine kicked in. They make dance music. They should be popular–unless you think the appropriate place for dancing is in your cramped living room. Friends who don’t participate in the "scene," as one perpetrator refers to it, complain that conversations about music often amount to little more than strings of names and third-rate towns, with little appraisal given to sensual quality of the sounds themselves, or how you maniacally replayed the same tape from ninth grade until it snapped one day while you [insert important moment here] and your weeping forced you to admit how excessive your CD collection really is. If we really wanted music to be an intellectual endeavor, we’d be discussing the evolution from Wagner to Stockhausen, rather than "indie" and hoping no one calls us a hipster. Indie, instead of being about love of the art, is small talk which people take too seriously, as shown by this column. You want to know what’s really obscure? Classical music. Especially the more recent stuff.
Of course, it’s not nearly so easy to pretend you know all there is to know about composers and their influences as it is to pretend to know everything about Indie, because rock stars (even the ones from Chapel Hill) are cool enough to bother being interested in. They have corduroys that fit, and a band, which implies friends. Not that there’s anything wrong with liking pop; these skinny four track vegans provide a nicely (re)packaged image of social and artistic success for us to emulate, and assure us that even people with myopic vision are ok. Except the ones whose myopia extends to emo . . . which is bad. Composers, they do what they do in the dark, all alone–and so who’s celebrating their identity?
Call it screamcore, Appalachia-no!, porno-pop, rock-a-bully– IN[outré]DIE sounds like the Wedding Present was a Promise Ring, or, more accurately, Granddaddy met the Danielson Family at a reunion for Los Desaparecidos. This genre-bending gang of four from Tuscaloosa skillfully melds earily [sic] screeching vocals with whisper-soft choirboy harmonies, the pounding beats of drum and bass with mournful fiddle dirges to create dense summerscapes. Their brilliant use of the Würlitzer on the track "Ego-Blossom" calls up to heaven’s pond, where Walden, perhaps this identity-exploring band’s precedent, sits lotus-style picking his toe lint. Spiky glock work is backed up by drummer Lila’s emotive yelp, and contrasted with a looped sample of a thousand lockers slamming shut, presumably with the song’s alienated heroine inside.
No, I didn’t lift this from my guilty morning coffee perusals of pitchforkmedia.com–though they expend nearly this much hyperbolic energy to describe bands that sound more like "Simon and Carbuncle coffee Klatching with Kurt" than anything as exciting as screamcore. And what is screamcore, you ask? My frustrated wail at the baseball-card mentality that indie seems to foist upon the average arty collegiate and shameless inability to untangle myself from it. Chamber-pop, slowcore, shoegazer, kindercore, IDM–there is a genre for every moment, mood, and type of kidskin tennis shoe, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of the music we listen to is well, pop. But it’s new and different–yeah, exactly–indie rock turns obscurity, quirk, and cleverness into social currency the same way Seventeen turns Britney’s recipe for tuna casserole into news.
I'm not saying that commercial music is good, or indie is bad; I’m saying the attitude of superiority that "indie" as a posture assumes assures that the music works much the same way that any other pop does, albeit on a smaller scale. It hawks a different set of values, but the goal of the average pinback purchaser isn’t really that different than the goal of a James Taylor greatest hits album. A lot of indie music adds disillusionment and alienation to the basic formulas of summer nights; youth; love; carefree; wistful road trips; and city loneliness, but barely tinkers with four-chord structure. How could it, what with my expectation of four fresh reviews every morning? Groundbreaking greatness just doesn’t occur as frequently as Magnet would have us believe.
Nothing wrong with four-chord structure there–I mean, we all need a stable ground from which to grow into grad students and copywriters. But is it really necessary to buy in, read reviews, chatter, and laugh at anybody who doesn’t know the complete oeuvre of Television, and bitch that somewhere in Middle America, Bjork, Radiohead, and The White Stripes are sharing CD-changer space with Linkin Biscuit and Limp Pork to maintain our self-respect as good glasses-wearing Dec readers? And if what we want is pop, do we have to discuss the musical subtlety of Tortoise and Autechre?
I’ll admit it smarted a bit when it was announced that The Faint was touring with No Doubt–I mean, their slippery-synth-kraftwerky mix had resulted in three broken lamps, a shattered mirror in my living room, and the death of my last wine glass. Then the caffeine kicked in. They make dance music. They should be popular–unless you think the appropriate place for dancing is in your cramped living room. Friends who don’t participate in the "scene," as one perpetrator refers to it, complain that conversations about music often amount to little more than strings of names and third-rate towns, with little appraisal given to sensual quality of the sounds themselves, or how you maniacally replayed the same tape from ninth grade until it snapped one day while you [insert important moment here] and your weeping forced you to admit how excessive your CD collection really is. If we really wanted music to be an intellectual endeavor, we’d be discussing the evolution from Wagner to Stockhausen, rather than "indie" and hoping no one calls us a hipster. Indie, instead of being about love of the art, is small talk which people take too seriously, as shown by this column. You want to know what’s really obscure? Classical music. Especially the more recent stuff.
Of course, it’s not nearly so easy to pretend you know all there is to know about composers and their influences as it is to pretend to know everything about Indie, because rock stars (even the ones from Chapel Hill) are cool enough to bother being interested in. They have corduroys that fit, and a band, which implies friends. Not that there’s anything wrong with liking pop; these skinny four track vegans provide a nicely (re)packaged image of social and artistic success for us to emulate, and assure us that even people with myopic vision are ok. Except the ones whose myopia extends to emo . . . which is bad. Composers, they do what they do in the dark, all alone–and so who’s celebrating their identity?
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