With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project’s creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album’s description on its Bandcamp page has further details on the clue we are given with the album title.
It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.
Despite seemingly being designed by a corporation to be mostly inoffensive, sometimes to the point of banality or worse, Coldplay launched into the world consciousness hot, with “Don’t Panic,” the song in the pole position on their debut album Parachutes. Though I feel more generosity towards Chris Martin and crew, some believe “Don’t Panic” is the band’s only good song. Whatever the case, the track was certainly a winning way for Coldplay to announce their arrival on the scene.1
Clive Thompson has the story of how Phil Collins accidentally invented gated reverb, the drum sound of the 80s, by leaving a talkback microphone on.
Normally, the reverb on a drum hit is intense at first, then slowly fades away. But in the Phil Collins drum session, the accidental reverb behaved differently. It had a nice, loud, booming reverb for a moment — then the reverb abruptly stopped. This created a very cool new type of drum sound. It was boomy and huge, but wasn’t messy, because the reverb for each drum hit ended before the next drum hit.
Gated reverb was used to startling effect on “In The Air Tonight” (watch a first-time reaction video to the song if you haven’t already). Prince jumped all over the drum sound, and it was also used by Kate Bush, John Cougar Mellencamp, Hall and Oates, and Duran Duran.
I’ve been on a post-punk x new wave kind of kick the last several days, after I learned Black Marble (who I blogged about last year) are going to be playing nearby in September. The algorithm overlords recommended Castlebeat to me after the end of a listening sesh of “Bigger Than Life.” I hadn’t listened to Castlebeat in a few years, but remembered them from this fan video using footage from the best movie ever to take place in a Target big box store — Career Opportunities.
I recently hit my 20th anniversary (!!!) at the company where I work. Instead of a gold watch, I got what amounts to about $400 in a foreign currency they call “Spotlight points.” Thought I didn’t pull the trigger right away, my immediate thought was to blow the lot on a pair of Sennheiser HD 650 headphones. I’ve been researching these cans for some time now, but even at a consistent 38% off, a price point of nearly 400 bones meant I wouldn’t just impulse buy these things.
Everyone has been posting about the Aadam Jacobs collection. Since I love indie music from the 90s, I’m certainly going to spend some time with the massive 10,000 live recordings collection. I went to the page on the Internet Archive and one of the first recordings I saw was Rachel’s at Lounge Ax. I bought The Lounge Ax Defense and Relocation compilation created to save the venerable Chicago club when it released.
In honor of Tops’ new album Bury The Key being released yesterday, I’m featuring one of the tracks, “Falling On My Sword,” as the Saturday Night Video this week.
“Falling On My Sword” is my favorite among the early singles from this LP and probably the one that most closely matches the 70’s prog rock-inspired cover art. It’s a bit of a left turn for Tops. Based on their previous work, you would think anything born of a seventies influence would be more in line with late-decade disco (and the remainder of the album features some of that).
Brothers Evan and Quinn Seurkamp, who primarily make up the Ohio band The Laughing Chimes, call upon the hauntings of the Appalachian foothills of their native state as inspiration for their gothic jangly post-punk. There is a wistfulness appropriate to the rust belt and its faded glory that pervades their album Whispers in the Speech Machine.
Hunter Tice (a man after my own heart) writes for Christ and Pop Culture about the importance of physical media in a world that is increasingly detached from the material when engaging with art.
An increasing reliance on digital micro-conveniences results in digitality becoming a powerhouse vehicle of mindless consumption and physical disengagement. As our culture endorses digital consumption in more facets of life, it inherently devalues the significance of physicalness. That has incredible implications on how society functions, including how we perceive the world of media and artistic expression.
Bandcamp is finally adding a feature that I, and other like-minded enjoyers of music have been wanting for some time. The new ability to create playlists feels like it aligns with the ethics of the service, which is mostly a good thing, but the focus may be a bit too heavy in that area.1 Bandcamp describes the feature as, “Like digital mixtapes.” There’s not much need to describe how it works, everyone is familiar with the concept of playlists and this feature appears to do exactly what it says on the tin.
