Disqo Disco (Fallout Lounge) Almost everything you've ever wanted to know about Disqo Disco is featured below by our new contributor, "That One Guy." Do I have that right?
Ettrick | Abiku | Mistress | Party City | | Tony Dryer (House Of Tinnitus) The show tonight features a couple of well regarded touring bands that are quite dissimilar and have both headlined shows at H.O.T in the past. As screaming and aggravated as Abiku can be at times, they are also danc-ey and feature a keytar. Ettrick is an "all acoustic, free jazz, black metal" group with two drummers and saxophones and they play a fierce style of music that sounds even better than that description would have you believe. Mistress is a punishing Denton harsh noise duo, and Party City is an all improv act featuring members of Great Tyrant, Koji Kondo and Zanzibar Snails.
Colin Meloy | Laura Gibson (Granada) The best thing Colin Meloy ever did was a cover of a Joanna Newsom song, and he even kind of screwed that up.
Thirty five dollars?! I'll pay that for some reunited prog rock band minus some deceased members, but thirty five bucks for a group of dudes that barely outgrew emo and started noodling it up with the Red Hot Chili Peppers? You're joking right? And no opening act? I thought only the Floyd was allowed to do that at Texas Stadium circa 1994. That's worth thirty five bucks.
Note: Free after-party at the Loft to follow featuring The Party and certainly more entertaining than this two and a half hour "show."
For those that don’t keep up with electronic music nerdery on the Internets, “blog house” is a term invented in February of last year on a certain DJ message board to derisively describe the not quite electro, not quite house, not quite techno, and, some would say, not quite danceable brand of dance music being produced at the time by the likes of Ed Banger and other assorted Francophiliac hangers-on championed on music blogs like Discobelle, Fluokids, and Big Stereo. For those, some would say, grouchy purists, this was dance music created for the Hot Topic generation, a movement destined to exist via disposable crappy sounding mp3s played through computer speakers by people who might never see the inside of a real dance club.
Over a year later, many of the negative connotations have been removed, and a great deal of the focus has shifted to L.A. and Australia, but “blog house” stills gets thrown around to peg that “I know it when I hear it” tech-y, electro-y, house-y style that makes the crazy kids in $100 dollar t-shirts jump up and down and spill their beers. “What a fascinatingly succinct encapsulation of blog house,” you might say. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot, but I started reading this expecting a review of the new Disqo Disco mix, not a cut-rate Wikipedia entry.” Fair enough, but if someone asked me for an example of what blog house sounds like and where it is in April 2008, I would be quick to point them in the direction of the first 2/3 of this mix.
Disqo Disco Vol. I is mostly a collection of Internet hits from the past few months, featuring blog house (i.e. Calvin Harris and Revolte), blog house remixes of indie rock (i.e. The Twelve remixing Asobi Seksu and Black Kids), blog house remixes of blog house (i.e. Breakbot remix of PNAU and Bag Raiders remix of Bag Raiders), and lots of Australians, all mixed by guys in a band from Dallas. This is dance music democratized and torn free from the culture centers of New York and Ibiza-- it’s a little sloppy, it’s a little noisy, and you probably won’t be compelled to listen to it more than once. But then again, it’s really fun and probably sounds great if you’re drunk and squeezed up next to a sweaty body on the cramped dance floor of a bar. Basically, it’s everything that is good/bad about this whole scene. That’s just the first forty minutes, though.
Around about the time “Disqo Disco, Vol. 1” gets to blog house forerunner Alan Braxe’s remix of Annie’s “Heartbeat,” things take a far more interesting and unpredictable turn in to a nice run of spacey disco tunes by the likes of Supermax, Giorgio Moroder, and Roxy Music cover girl Amanda Lear. Finish things off with a sex disco classic, “More, More, More,” and some Electric Light Orchestra, and you have the fine ending to a night on the tiles. It would have been really interesting to hear these and other similar tracks incorporated throughout the mix, and it seems like a missed opportunity to draw the lines that link these genres of dance music together. Maybe the dance floor isn’t for learning, though. Best blog house mix I’ve heard this week? No. Interesting enough to make me go to Fallout Lounge and see these guys up close and personal in the communal environs dance music was made for? Definitely.
(Disqo Disco spins every Tuesday night at Fallout Lounge)
Enon | Tame...Tame and Quiet | RTB2 (Lola's, Ft. Worth) Enon are one of those bands that's difficult to classify despite the fact that their music isn't really all that strange. My introduction to this band came in 2002 when they released High Society, an electro leaning pop record that featured everything from dance-rock to twee pop to straight indie jingle jangle jams, with styles clashing against one another and almost never blending together, rendering the record one that sounded like it was recorded by two or three different bands. Uptempo dance track followed by acoustic pop track, etc. This kind of eclecticism still seems to be what Enon thrives on, even though it feels decidedly less adventurous these days than it did even a few years ago. Something tells me this will still be a fun show, however, and this Touch and Go supergroup of sorts (featuring ex members of Brainiac and Blonde Redhead) might make your drive to Ft. Worth a worthy cause.
If any of you caught the Collecting and Collectivity show at Conduit last month, you got a little taste of what Dallas artist Noah Simblist does while you are working your crappy day job. He took some time to talk with us us via email about the show, his artwork, the Dallas art scene, blog comments, and changing the hearts and minds of Young Republicans.
Could you talk a little about how the Collecting and Collectivity project came about, all of the elements involved, etc?
This project started with conversations between Charissa Terranova and I. She was then teaching art history at SMU and we wanted to construct some programming that would bridge the art and art history departments. Theoretically, we were both interested in the legacy of radicalism in the avant-garde. Today with an art market that has been able to assimilate just about any idea, no matter how subversive, we were wondering just how subversive ideas could participate in art institutions – if at all. This also came at a time when the Dallas Museum of Art was getting a huge gift from the Rachofsky, Rose and Hoffman collections which highlighted post-war and contemporary art. So we decided to put together a symposium, some lectures a graduate seminar, a panel discussion at the College Art Association conference and the show at Conduit.
We approached Nancy Whitenack from Conduit to ask if she wanted to collaborate and she was very excited. We also wrote some grants and raised the money from SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, as well as the Art, Art History and English departments. Charissa took a job with UTD’s Central Track residency program midway through which made the process a little more complicated and in the end she had very little to do with the exhibition. She contributed to an essay and UTD funded the brochure for the exhibition.
At the same time, I was editing an issue of Artlies about collectivism with Michelle White from the Menil and the whole project became a monster that lasted about two years. We started with an idea and then raised the money and then the organizing started. This involved contacting people and trying find the right mix for the symposium and the Conduit show. This was a long and complicated process and I’m happy to move on with my own work but it was very rewarding and there were some amazing people involved.
What has been your experience working with Glasstire, Art Lies, and other publications? Glasstire, like our blog, allows for comments on your articles. Do you ever read them? Have you ever gotten any really bad ones?
I have loved writing for those publications. I found that it has helped me to stay connected to the art community and to participate in a kind of dialogue in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Sometimes the “dialogue” on the message boards or in the comments on Glasstire can be pretty childish and I try not to participate in that. I do read them sometimes but try to ignore them for the most part. The worst comments that were ever written about me had more to do with a review of my work that Charissa Terranova wrote. It became pretty clear that the backlash had little to do with my work but more with taste – a reaction against minimalism or conceptualism that was attached to me in a very generalized way. I didn’t respond because I didn’t think that the criticism really had anything to do with me and getting involved would be a losing battle.
You moved to Dallas from New York four years ago. What has been your experience here, working with galleries and local artists?
When I was in New York, I worked for a print publisher, a print dealer and an artist as well as teaching part time. Since moving here I have had much more time for my work but also the freedom to come up with projects like Collecting and Collectivity and writing for Artlies and Glasstire. I find the Dallas community to be like the Texas art community as a whole, pretty unpretentious and open to work together to try new things. That said, I don’t think that Dallas has a very strong infrastructure for critical thinking. There is the Core Program in Houston and Art Pace in San Antonio and Austin has a PhD program in Art history. While the Dallas art scene is ambitious and exciting in many ways it still uses shopping and couture as the main model. In many ways the artists supported by the commercial galleries in town follow suit. Although I do think that the recent panel discussions and video screenings at places like Conduit and Road Agent and the great work that Paul Slocum does at And/Or points in the right direction.
I was surprised when I first read about your exhibition at the SMU Pollock gallery, "Protocols of Zion"- it seems more like something you would see at And/Or than a primarily conservative Methodist university. How has your academic career affected your work?
Well, I decided to do that show at SMU for precisely that reason. I thought it would have greater power in the space that it was about rather than from the outside looking in. I self consciously organized the exhibition to be about and for the university community. That way the line between fact and fiction was harder to judge. This actually got me into some hot water with the SMU legal department. I also put together a panel discussion in the show that brought together Rick Halperin, a professor of history and expert on human rights as well as Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies to talk about the tensions between divine right and human rights in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We had a very diverse crowd that included Jews, Christians, Muslims, teachers and students from Political Science, History, Art, Art History and Religious Studies plus some people from the Dallas community. It was a very powerful conversation bringing together some ideas that generally don’t get talked about at the same time.
In many ways this show and the panel as a part of it shows some things about my experience at SMU. While the administration and student body are for the most part pretty conservative, it gives us something to talk about. So that when I bring up the connections between art and politics in my classes I’m not preaching to the converted. I really feel like I bring up challenging and complex issues that aren’t being talked about otherwise. This idea of dialogue that is at the center of academia is also increasingly at the center of my work. I think that working in an academic context has allowed me to follow this path much more easily than if I had staid more in the commercial art world. I do think that there are lots of spaces of overlap but they are rare – especially in this country.
Your work spans a pretty wide variety of mediums- sound pieces, painting, drawing, video art. What are some of your future plans?
I have a whole bunch of new ideas and some old ones that I want to extend. Some new ideas include a piece about Palestine, Texas (not far form Dallas) and the ways that the American west has been used as a kind of promised land that takes on a similar utopian and messianic character. This is especially interesting to me given the new rise in Christian Zionism with people like the Rev John Hagee that I talked about with the Protocols of Zion show that are based in Texas.
I also want to do a project about the history of African American and Jewish American relations. The 1960’s was a time when Jewish Marxist activists were deeply tied to the civil rights movement. The NAACP was founded by blacks and Jews together. The history of this relationship has unfolded in a complicated way and unfortunately there has been prejudice from some factions on both sides against the other since then. But I am interested in the use of Zion as an image by African American Baptist churches and how it relates to Jewish ideas of Zion, which today is mostly connected to the state of Israel. A tangential aspect of this is the phenomenon of Black Hebrews (African Americans who believe that they are the descendants of the ancient Israelites) who live in a small town in Israel called Dimona.
I’m also going to participate in a project run by the International Committee Against Housing Demolition this summer. They are an NGO that works as an advocacy group for Palestinian rights. They will be building houses in the West Bank destroyed by the Israeli authorities. I will be working with them and recording the experience with video and audio as well as using some interviews.
All of these ideas are more thematic at this point but they might become installations with video, audio, drawings and text like the past projects that I’ve worked on.
Welcome to a short It List. We have two local record reviews coming early next week, as well as at least one other feature and the possiblity of a pretty big announcement. We'll see:
FRIDAY
Ghosthustler | Genova (The Cavern) Don't know much about the DJ/producer Genova since dude didn't feel like putting any tracks on his Myspace page. However, judging by his friends list, he's into all the blog house stuff and probably some disco, etc. as well. Ha. Can you name a better way to make assumptions about music than to base said assumptions on someones Myspace top 8? I can't. And I'll be interested to see what kind of crowd shows up for a Ghosthustler headlining show in Dallas. In Denton, the place is easily packed. In Dallas, I have no idea. It's funny when you think about it, however, because Ghosthustler is easily one of the most nationally buzzed local groups in DFW/Denton right now. I just don't know if a lot of people in Dallas even realize it. Prove me wrong please.
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone | Clue to Kalo | Tre Orsi (Hailey's) Strong reactions from both sides of the fence on Casiotone-- so many people I know either completely love or completely loath this dude, and frankly, I don't get what all the drama is about on either end. The guy is probably a classic example of contemporary bedroom synth/dreampop, and although some of his lyrics verge on inexcusable emo sap, I don't see what there really is to hate either. In fact, I've heard some pretty honest and cleverly written music in the short time I've spent checking this stuff out. No one will ever do this music better than Magnetic Fields did on Holiday, but hey, a Magnetic Fields show would probably cost three times as much as this.
Goldie (Lizard Lounge) Drum n Bass legend Goldie plays Lizard Lounge tonight, and I have no idea what to expect from it, especially considering that I haven't even thought about this dude in like ten years. And check the Wikipedia entry on him (linked above). Does he remind of you of Crazy Eyes Killaat all?
Bone Thugs N Harmony (SMU Campus, Doak Walker Plaza) In case you missed our silly news bulletin on this subject a couple days ago, Bone Thugs will be playing a concert on SMU's campus, and specifically Doak Walker Plaza, at noon. It's unclear exactly what this show costs, if anything, but I think the chance to get to see Bone Thugs perform in front of a group of rich young Republicans singing along to "First of the Month" is worth a small price, at least. Wait, never mind. No one at SMU knows what the fuck "First of the Month" even is. I bet they do know what weed is, though, and that seems to be Bone's second most frequent topic of song.
RJD2 (the Loft) RJD2 is probably the classic backpacker, as he was a staple of early Def Jux for a number of years. I've generally been underwhelmed by everything I've ever heard from this guy, but people who are into "smart" hip hop seem to worship him. Luckily, I don't hang out with those kind of people.
A couple of openings going on this weekend. If you didn't catch the Casey Williams opening last week, be sure to get your ass over there before it closes. It's worth it, trust me.
Xiu Xiu | Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down (Lola's) Man, if you're into some uncomfortable banter and even more uncomfortable performances, then tonight's Xiu Xiu show might be for you. I used to be fairly into some of Xiu Xiu's material a few years ago, and although I won't say that I no longer have any interest in Jamie Stewart's strange compositions, I feel compelled to say that his work now reminds me of a recent critique of English noise legends Whitehouse that appeared in Wire: Shock for shock's sake, no matter how shocking, is kind of, well, boring, particularly in an era where nothing seems to really shock anyone. And seeing Xiu Xiu at SXSW a couple years ago further confirmed this feeling, as I think I almost feel asleep during their performance. Or maybe I almost "passed out." I can't remember. I do, however, have to give him props for the song "Support Our Troops" on Fabulous Muscles. One of the most emotionally confrontational critiques of the U.S. Military I've ever heard.
AFI Film Festival-- Nerdcore Rising (Angelika, 715pm) Man, I've hit up two films throughout the course of this festival so far, and both were extremely well attended despite being anything but mainstream in their appeal. Translation: even if you think "who the fuck is gonna go see a movie about nerdcore," get there early, because I promise, it's a lot more people than you think. Nerdcore Rising is, surprise surprise, a documentary about the growing popularity of the "nerdcore" hip hop movement, which was recently discussed in an issue of XLR8R that featured Ft. Worth's own MC Router.... who apparently isn't involved with Nerdcore anymore anyway. As I know very little about the history of this sub-subculture, I'm kind of interested in checking this film out. PS-- I've always thought that Busdriver was way nerdier than just about anyone in hip hop, and he's not even part of this nerdcore thing.
Lost Generation (Fallout) Wanz might have the most sonically diverse record collection of any DJ in Dallas, with playlists that include artists ranging from Pinch to Autechre to Kraftwerk to Boyz Noize to the toughest, most challenging early industrial tracks you could ever hope to not dance to. Good stuff.
And I must say that I'm actually a tad curious to hear exactly what MC 900 Ft. Jesusdoes during his weekly Thursday night set at Lee Harvey's. I think I saw the video for "If I only had a Brain" on MTV like 50 times during that one summer when I got grounded a lot.
