Jeg tænkte, dette vil ske

To all radio listeners:

KPSU is currently in the process of installing a bunch of new (and, in my opinion, rather unnecessary) equipment. As of now, the signal is down -- so there will be no show today. Hopefully things will be back in order by Wednesday.

So that you're not too sad (don't be -- I didn't have anything planned anyway) here is Wednesday's playlist:

1. Smedby - Gentle Touch (SV)
2. Private Life of a Cat - the LK (SV)
3. Gloomy Planets - the Notwist
4. Summercat - Billie the Vision & the Dancers (SV)
5. Pretenders (featuring Hello Saferide) - Montt Mardié
6. Starman - David Bowie
7. Moonman - Rebecca Phinney
8. Far Apart - Oliver North Boy Choir (DK)
9. (Lack of) Love Will Tear Us Apart - the Honeydrips (SV)
10. 156 - Mew (DK)
11. Shake It Off - El Perro Del Mar (SV)
12. Salt - Mugison (IS)
13. Going to Where the Tea Trees Are - Peter von Poehl (SV)

And because I am so nice -- also because I realize I have not done so in several weeks -- there are two songs you can download, both of which come from the label Songs I Wish I Had Written, which I think is an excellent name. Anyway -- Gentle Touch's Smedby, which I discovered under the loved tracks on my last.fm, despite not remembering ever having heard it before -- who knows? -- and the LK's Private Life of a Cat, which starts out kind of strangely, at least in terms of sound, but still winds up being very good. Both are kind of electro, but not overly so. Smedby is more indie-pop-ish, albeit with an obvious drum machine. Private Life of a Cat has a very catchy chorus, and it is not really obviously about/told by a cat, which I also like.

Tomorrow -- or perhaps later today -- I will have another post about Hello Saferide and Sincerely Yours. And hopefully I'll soon be able to overcome my apathy toward writing (and, I guess, pretty much doing anything in general), because there's so much stuff going on right now, and I really should be out doing it, or writing about. Soon...

--DL--
Ashtrays Podcast (3. september 2008)
Smedby (Gentle Touch)
Private Life of a Cat (the LK)

Gamle og nye spillelister

I just hit a wall, but I have nothing to do for an hour, with a computer that for some reason has no normal word processing capabilities, so here are the playlists.

I onsdagses:
1. Mengele y el amor - Klaus&Kinski
2. Lovely Allen - Holy Fuck
3. Migration - Sambassadeur (SV)
4. Godzilla vs. the Island of Manhattan - ballboy
5. Please Please Please (Let Me Get What I Want) - ANT (SV)
6. Lester - Bakers at Dawn (SV)
7. Dogs - Emily Frembgen
8. Sogne - 9 (DK)
9. Forsyn - Lis er Stille (DK)
10. Noisy Summer - the Raveonettes (DK)
11. No Excuses - Air France (SV)

The playlist is a little shorter than normal, and there is a bit of other random (automix) music between tracks 9 and 10, due to the fact that a fire alarm went off in the middle of the show and everyone had to evacuate. Sorry. Just skip that part or something.

I dagses spilleliste:
1. Lions & Tigers - Asobi Seksu
2. How Can I Love You If You Won't Lie Down - Silver Jews
3. Heartbeats - the Knife (SV)
4. The Air We Breathe - Figurines (DK)
5. Take Me Home (Eskimo-Esque Remix) - Club 8 (SV)
6. What to Pass On / What to Keep - Jomi Massage (DK)
7. So Long - Agata & Me (DK)
8. Telemarketing - Pelle Carlberg (SV)
9. Hyperschlieb - epo-555 (DK)
10. Havana Affair - the Ramones
11. Scene I - Just Like You Don't - Blue Swan (DK)
12. The Dog Boy - Outmen (SV)
13. Petite - Oliver North Boy Choir (DK)
14. Cat Piano - Seabear (IS)

Apparently I was tired earlier, too (or something like it) because I didn't feel like putting together a playlist. Instead, I picked a couple songs, and then stuck my iTunes on shuffle to get the rest. Turned out pretty well, I think.

--DL--
Ashtrays Podcast (27. august 2008)
Ashtrays Podcast (29. august 2008)

God og bedre

I’m behind again. But I have equipped my apartment with internet, finally, so posts should be a bit more regular from here on out.

I fredagses spilleliste:
1. From Blown Speakers – the New Pornographers
2. Danger! (Ice Cream Shout) – The Sound of Arrows (SV)
3. Too Young (The Tough Alliance Remix) – Taken by Trees (SV, SV)
4. Lights – Memoplay (SV)
5. Blue Night – New Ghosts
6. Heavy Metal Drummer – Wilco
7. Love Song – Tiny Microphone
8. Hearts on Fire – Rumskib (DK)
9. This Heart’s On Fire – Wolf Parade
10. War is Over – Speaker Bite Me (DK)
11. Once I Was Like You – Firefox AK vs. Laid (SV, SV)
12. Straight Thin Line – Frida Hyvönen (SV)
13. Mica – Mew (DK)

Now I am going to celebrate the fact that I no longer have to walk clear to PSU to use the internet, by walking clear to PSU, to see Junkface playing at noon in the park blocks. Those shows are free, so you should come, too.

Speaking of shows, though I hardly ever do this, I’m also going to recommend that everyone listen to Andy Combs and the Moth’s set on last week’s Live Friday. It was excellent -- one of the best Live Fridays I’ve ever done -- and I listened to very little else the entire weekend. Their sound is rather… unusual, but it’s definitely worth a listen.

--DL--
Ashtrays Podcast (22. august 2008)

For meget engelsk!

Yeah, a lot of talking in English yesterday. Fortunately, two songs with Swedish and one with Danish lyrics to (in part) make up for it.

Spillelisten:

1. Love Doesn’t Last – Broder Daniel (SV)
2. Anna – Hello Saferide (SV)
3. Albion – Babyshambles
4. The Quitter – Good Luck Casper (DK)
5. Magic Man – Said the Shark (DK)
6. Love No – the Teenagers
7. Trying Something New – the Honeydrips (SV)
8. I Know a Place – Jay Reatard
9. The Hunger – the Distillers
10. Today – Agata & Me (DK)
11. Hjärta. Instinkt. Principer – Johan Heltne (SV)
12. Kräm (Så Nära Får Ingen Gå) – Kent (SV)
13. Plantage – Under Byen (DK)
14. Anna – Hello Saferide (SV)

Yes, I played Anna twice. But I would have rather played it the whole time. You will understand, once you hear it. The album (More Modern Short Stories from Hello Saferide) is out 24. September.

--DL--
Ashtrays Podcast (20. august 2008)

Hvem skriver vi for?

This is a rant that happened because it rained and I didn't go outside at all yesterday. It has nothing to do with music whatsoever. Sorry.

Who are we writing for?

When I’m not working on this blog, there is something else I do. I am a writer, as Colin Meloy put it, a writer of fiction. I write short stories.

But earlier today, standing in my bathroom and attempting to flatten my bangs, wondering whether I look more like a high school English teacher or a high school student, it suddenly struck me: there is no audience for the work I do. Who am I writing for, really?

Well, let’s start with a simpler question -- who am I? I’m a college graduate in Portland, Oregon (a town with one of the nation’s highest percentages of people with degrees). I’ve read a good number more books than many people, but still far fewer than I ought to have read. My sole ambition, career-wise, is to work at Powell’s.

Everyone who’s ever become successful as a writer has probably, at some point in their career, said “write what you know.” But what I know is generally rather dull, and what I like isn’t necessarily much of what I know. So let’s look at what I know second-hand: what I read, when I read. Well, I like literature, but I also at times enjoy smut.

Herein lies the problem. Entertaining as it might be, I can’t write smut -- not, at least, without dragging it out into pages and pages during the course of which nothing happens, or, worse, making it into literature. But even if I could write smut, I wouldn’t do it -- I’d never want to see my name attached to anything that could even fleetingly be considered appropriate for ensconcement in a hot pink cover.

As for literature -- I can write it, to a degree, at least. (I like to think so, at least.) But when we read literature, largely the books we read are classics, those with famous names or authors ancient or long dead. (The last book I finished was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which has both.) Unless I’m David Mitchell or Haruki Murakami -- which I clearly am not -- it’s kind of… out of luck.

There is only so much room on the bookstore shelf, and it’s a lot easier to break into the market by writing a two hundred page teenage fluff novel about a girl who finds out she’s a princess or a (considerably longer series about a) boy who finds out he’s a wizard (nothing against JK Rowling; however, readers have suggested that my version of the seventh year is better than hers) than by sending out stories with titles like Spring Summer Fall or The Boy with the Green Sweater to little lit mags whose circulations become even further from little and closer to zero every year. The mass market wants mass appeal, and the vast majority of the time, modern literature hasn’t got that.

But even if I -- or, for that matter, anyone else -- was to write something and have it published, who would read it? Once again, I’m lucky to live in Portland, the metropolitan area with the largest percentage of library card holders in the nation. However, even within Portland -- and even more so elsewhere -- many people don’t go to the library very much, if at all. (In the small town where I grew up, there are people who don’t even know where the library is. Flabbergasting. I mean, there aren’t even that many buildings.) There are so many other ways to spend our time, and reading -- despite being one of the only things that’s intellectually stimulating anymore -- isn’t, unfortunately, very stimulating in certain other ways. (I’m very old-fashioned, of course; maybe if I played more video games, I wouldn’t feel this way.) But what I’m really getting at is this: people don’t read. Not anymore.

I should have trouble getting books out of the library. Annoying as it is, it’s also reassuring when I’m not able to find any of the items on my list because they’re all checked out. But this hardly ever happens. And going through library catalogs, it’s quite common to see a larger number of copies of some new sensation than of a book we should all be reading, like, I don’t know, Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man (of which the Multnomah County Library system has only two copies). But there’s no audience.

That’s the trouble. There’s not an audience. Even I am guilty of it -- drifting toward the young adult section when I should be filling out hold forms for Atwood and Nabokov.

Who are we writing for? There aren’t many people who want to read slice-of-life vignettes where nothing really happens, no matter how skillful the prose might be. Sex sells. Sensation sells. The stories I write don’t contain much of those elements -- or at least they don’t contain much of those elements, not in the right combinations.

Whenever I try to write things that other people would like to read, I wind up growing bored, or disgusted, or some other negative emotion, and abandoning the manuscripts. But when I try to write the stories that I want to write, the stories that glow inside me and make me breathe, I become discouraged, knowing that although I’ve finally set the safe-kept little darlings (“kill your darlings,” said William Faulkner, talking about revising) on paper, no one will ever read much further than, perhaps, if I’m lucky, the first paragraph -- and I abandon them all the same.

My computer hard drive, as well as my own mind and countless notebooks floating around my apartment and my parents’ house, are filled with disembodied paragraphs, sentences, phrases even -- all waiting for the time when I work myself up to put them together. It’s not courage I need; it’s not inspiration or even motivation. I think it’s just a bit of a decrease in the feeling of utter hopelessness, the idea that maybe, somebody…

I don’t know. Occasionally I tell myself I’m going to write a popular young adult smut novel, to get myself a start, a name to go on, to engender some sort of financial stability. I’d use a pseudonym, perhaps. It wouldn’t be anything like the stories I normally write. It wouldn’t even be anything like any story I particularly wanted to write. I would just do it to finance my other, more legitimate activity. Like the kid who sells drugs to pay for college, only less illegal. Completely legal, in fact, but morally wrong. And, for me, morally impossible. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t. That’s where the audience (what little audience for books remains) is -- but it’s not the audience I want.

I want the audience who went to college and took the classes they wanted, even though they knew sociology was useless. I want the audience who has more books than DVDs on their shelves. I want the audience who reads four books at once, except for all the books they finish in one sitting. I want the audience who buys a book and reads it (or maybe, like me, reads it, then buys it, then reads it again), then gives it to a friend, and the friend reads it, then gives it to another friend and that friend reads it, too. I want the audience who trades books like hugs. Or I want the audience who hoards the books they love, whether it’s multiple copies, special editions, or just general accumulation. I want the audience who isn’t pompous about what they’ve read, who has gaping holes in their reading history and feels bad about it, the audience who always has one more book to read -- not because they should but because they want to. I want the audience who wants to…

Who am I writing for? Every good story I write is targeted toward one specific person -- maybe, in a few rare cases, two or three. It doesn’t matter if they’ll ever read it. But if I write for just that one person, I write it so they’ll want it. Maybe no one else in the world will, but that one person will want it.

It’s not a very good way to achieve mass appeal. It’s kind of like this blog -- if I wrote about music other than just that which particularly interests me, maybe more people would read it. If I wrote things that were designed to appeal to more than one person, maybe I would be more motivated to share them. But the difference between one and the number of people who might actually read whatever it is is so small that… no, it isn’t really worth it.

A year ago I wrote an essay for class called Every Book is a Coffee Table Book. Largely, this is true. But a coffee table book (unless, perhaps, it was a gift and has sentimental value) doesn’t really mean anything. If I write something, I want it to be honest, to be meaningful -- not something that can be compared to novelty socks (to which I compared contemporary fiction in the essay). There’s nothing wrong with novelty socks. I even have a pair, and I like them enough that I took them with me to Denmark. But here -- a perfect analogy -- for the past month and a half, they’ve been wadded in a ball in a bag full of mostly dirty clothes in the back of my friend’s bathroom closet. (Yes, this is true. We are procrastinators, okay?) Despite the fact that they are decorated with stars, I haven’t missed them -- not even once. I don’t want my writing -- to be honest, I don’t want any writing -- to be like that.

So, who am I writing for? I don’t know. Is there an audience? I don’t know. But somewhere out there, somewhere in the world, there is a person who every opening paragraph rings true for. Somewhere is the person who wants to read the rest of the story that begins like this:

Last week Sammy informed me that I was going to lose my biking muscles if I did not stop walking so much. “Walking and riding a bike exercise completely different parts of your leg,” Sammy said. You would think that the two activities are compatible, but they are not.

This person probably isn’t you. It probably isn’t anyone you -- or even I -- know. Don’t feel bad. But next time you’re reading something and feel tempted to put it down, just -- try and keep reading.

Begyndning...

I am about to graduate from college.

Tomorrow (I wrote this last night), I’ll receive my honors cord and walk in the commencement -- which I really feel is the wrong word -- ceremony; a few weeks later I’ll get my actual diploma. Some people are entirely uninterested in this (this being mostly the ceremony) while others are quite over-sentimental. For example: my sister called it a landmark.

Getting ready for this occasion is the reason why I do not have band links in the playlist down below. I will probably put them up later (but there’s always the chance I won’t). For the moment, though, I’m going to focus on commencement. I plan on taking a book and mostly being bored, but I’ll still be really happy to see people I know there…

I gårses spilleliste:

1. The Denial Twist – Damian
2. Lights Out – Santogold
3. Close to Me – Club 8 (SV)
4. Tragic Mirror – Sondre Lerche (NW)
5. On the Prowl – the Gossip
6. Summer Here Kids – Grandaddy
7. With Every New Day – David & the Citizens (SV)
8. L’Indifference – Radio LXMBRG (SV)
9. Start to Melt – Peter Bjorn & John (SV)
10. Time is of the Essence – Cold Mailman (NW)
11. On the Radio – the Concretes (SV)
12. Skimret – Nordpolen (SV)
13. Just Can’t Get Enough (Tiger Baby Remix) – CPH-Jet (DK, DK)
14. Romance on Drugs – Little Jimmy Reeves (DK?)

I will, of course, continue with the radio show even after graduation; never fear.

Samlejer med mikrofoner (PDX Pop Now! III)

--This is Part III. Read Part I and Part II first.--

And Sunday. Due to another scheduling weirdness, World’s Greatest Ghosts were on at 12:40. (PM, not AM.) For the first time in recent memory, I managed to arrive to something early; I got there around 12:15 or 20, in time to see about half of Wooden Indian Burial Ground’s set.

And, oh my god, they are my new favorite band. They sat in chairs and played on the pavement rather than the stage, which is endearing enough. Maybe they sounded kind of like a folk or bluegrass band -- a banjo made an appearance -- but it was so much more than that. I’m having trouble remembering now… It was very weird -- Syd Barret would have loved it -- but whereas in many cases the weirdness takes away from the musicality and the enjoyability, in the case of Wooden Indian Burial Ground, it didn’t. I thought they were great, and I’m now absolutely obsessed with finding out how the singer makes his voice sound like that. If you’ve heard them, you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t heard them, there are songs to be played on myspace. Go now.

Thinking back now, I realize that I could have easily missed this entire set. If I’d slept a little longer, or eaten a more complete lunch… or if I’d taken into consideration that even though it was overcast the entire morning, the clouds would probably blow off later (they did, and I got my only sunburn of the year), and put on sunblock… Or even if I’d just been slightly more self-conscious that morning and timed my walk to arrive exactly when the Ghosts’ set began, so as to minimize feelings of awkwardness. It’s really pure coincidence that I saw Wooden Indian Burial Ground at all. I’m very, very glad I did. It was just, like, standing there and wow. Arya described it as going back in time (by about 150 years) and, yeah, I’d say that was pretty accurate. But, as I said before, it was so much more that that, too.

World’s Greatest Ghosts played after that. Personally, they seem like a really nice, fun band. You can tell they’re having fun playing, and that makes it fun listening. More bands should be like them. Really.

I saw Meth Teeth, too, but I don’t really remember anything.

Poddington Bear, who was dressed in a white t-shirt, white pants, and a children’s bear hat (the kind that Velcros under your chin and has ears) started things indoors with an unexpected twist -- rather than a “normal” musical set, as would be played by a band or soloist, he delivered forty minutes of karaoke. He had programmed the backing tracks, as well as the video part that tells you what words to sing, in advance, and, after performing a cover of the Beatles’ (not Hello Saferide’s – more on that later) Anna, he brought a number of Portland musicians up onstage to show off their best -- or worst; you can never tell with karaoke. My favorite was the guy from I think Weinland, who did Rocket Man. Anyway, the whole thing was very bizarre. It was the first live Poddington Bear performance, and he said it wasn’t typical, so I can only wonder what sort of the thing the next one might be.

Grouper, also one person (this one female) was next. In terms of volume, it wasn’t quiet; in terms of sound, it was. I liked it, but it felt out of place. It’s not standing-up music, or even really festival music. Grouper is the kind of music you (or at least I would) listen to softly on the speakers while spacing out in your bathtub in the dark, not coming through enormous mains in a close, humid room filled with sweaty teenagers. I might like to see her again, but at the moment, I can’t think of any venue where such music would be appropriate. Maybe it’s more of a record thing…

I ended the festival mid-afternoon, with Mattress. This was several hours before the event’s actual conclusion, but it’s been pretty much established that I have neither the stamina nor the social skills/tolerance to remain in large groups -- even, unfortunately, large groups of music fans at music festivals -- for long periods of time.

Mattress was a good one for me to end on. He’s an interesting performer. Everything was pre-programmed, so all he actually did was sing. (I realize this sounds very similar to the Poddington Bear/karaoke description, but it was not at all.)

Normally I feel that machines have no place onstage, but in this case it worked. Everything sounded vaguely familiar -- but in the good way -- and I kept thinking this phrase: “making love to the microphone.” When he played El Dorado, I was seriously waiting for him to put the microphone inside his mouth. I do not know why, in any way; I guess to me, it’s just that kind of music. As it turned out, he did not put the microphone inside of his mouth -- but if he had done, it would have been perfect.

So, my second festival in a month. (Think about this: one month, two festivals, on two continents.) PDX Pop Now!, clearly, was different from Roskilde in many, many ways. Not complaining. Aside from the music of course, one of the things I enjoyed most was actually knowing people, like Darren and Joey, who, in between sets, took turns shaking up a two liter bottle of soda and trying to drink it before it fizzed out all over the place; or Brandon, who got ridiculously excited about the presence of Michael Ian Black, and who attempted to continue my education in sound teching every time we heard a bit of feedback; or Arya, who I think was there the entire time, and who kept appearing and disappearing, always grinning, like the Cheshire cat. And there were others… I was surprised by how many faces I recognized (and by how many seemed to recognize -- even if only vaguely -- me). Everything’s so much better when you know someone there. Thank you to everyone who kept me company and made me feel less awkward, even if for just the tiniest amount of time.

Anyway -- overall? Yeah, there were a few more bands I missed but would like to have seen -- a few for the first time, a few again -- but for the time I was there, it was generally pretty super. Or -- remember when I decided to bring back the word ‘keen’? It was pretty keen. I think it’s an amazing example of how great even (or especially) a free, all-ages festival can be, and I wish I’d known earlier that I’d have the weekend off work, so that I could have been more involved. Always next year, I suppose. Looking forward to it already.

(Real PS -- If you want to see pictures, go read Michael Mannheimer's Local Cut Reviews.)