tirado/thrown

Manu Chao, “Denia”, Proxima Estación: Esperanza, Virgin Records, 2001, Reissued by Nacional Records.

School of Seven Bells, “My Cabal”, Alpinisms, [Ghostly International, 2008]

There was a point in which this post was going to have some commentary on how SVIIB’s music is often under-represented in the indie music press as merely influenced by shoegaze and dreampop.  They’re obvious references, really; but the band’s sound suggests influences that are definitely more along the lines of what one would hear in freestyle and urban pop during the mid to late 80s.  It’s difficult not to hear traces, afterlives of Sheila E, Lisa Lisa, and other Latin@ musicians of the time.  But among the collateral deficiencies of rockism is a tendency to produce some negligent and lazy criticism, to say less of the dismissal of certain rhythms unbeknownst to the typical rockist as somehow ‘exotic’.  For shame.

Lambchop, “Grumpus,” Nixon, Merge Records, 2000

It’s difficult to find songs as well crafted as this one.

Chicano Batman, “Itotiani”, live at the Hobby Shop

There’s a line that Los Lobos sing, which seems to resonate while writing from Berlin.  ”No matter where you are, your’re never really far…Good Morning, Aztlan.”  Thanks to the Intertubz, the sentiment can be indulged in for a bit, half a world away.

Though we here at tirado/thrown sprechen ein bisschen Deutsch, it was nice to hear hispanohablantes milling about the streets of Berlin, riffing en castellano.

Broken Social Scene, “World Sick”, Forgiveness Rock Record, Arts and Crafts Records, 2010.

Selecting a type of post for this blog’s one hundredth was a little tricky.  Photo? Music? a Quote?  They seem like that’s all tirado/thrown really has time for these days.  But that’s just as well, as the editorial voice is still in the process of shaping and not quite ready to go live yet.  In the meantime, here is a cut that doesn’t necessarily thrive on nostalgia, which is a rather significant motivating factor in the music posted on this page.  This particular song, being a fairly recent one, is a welcome departure from the trend.  Then again, the experience of watching a dozen or so musicians perform this song is one that elicits sharing said song, only to have the listener of the studio cut imagine what it would sound like live.  Let number 100 wash over us all.

Image: Dallas Magazine

Stereolab: “Come Play in the Milky Night”, Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, Elektra Records, 1999

In A Child is Being Killed, Serge Leclaire writes:

“The loss of a representation of fullness, of motionless jouissance, must be relentlessly mourned and mourned.  A light must be eclipsed so it can shine and spread out on a background of darkness.  Whoever does not mourn, over and over, the loss of the wonderful child he might have been remains in limbo—in the milky light of a shadowless, hopeless waiting.  But whoever believes he has won the battle against the figure of the tyrant once and for all cuts himself off from the sources of his creative spirit and thinks he is strong when he stubbornly resists the reign of jouissance.”

Image: Maui Magazine

Few factors are able to interrupt the prolonged lack of posting on account of a forthcoming move to the other side of the country.  The reunion of Omaha’s Lullaby for the Working Class, a beloved though sorely under-appreciated band, is one such factor.  That they are doing so to aid the fight against Fremont Nebraska’s recent anti-immigration measure is all the more poignant.

With all the inflammatory rhetoric around immigration mounting to a fever pitch since 2006, friends and allies who see beyond the technology of the law and struggle to disarm it are always needed and most definitely welcome.  LFTWC will be joining Desaparecidos, Cursive, Bright Eyes and others for a July 31 show in Omaha, Nebraska, billed as a Concert for Equality.  More information regarding the show here, here, here, and here.

Today’s Cut of the Day comes from the band’s second record, “I Never Even Asked for Light”.  For that matter, all of Lullaby’s records are frankly among the best made in the late 90s, with an impeccable mix of intellect, heart, poetry, arrangement, and instrumentation that calls out and opens a future while raising a banner of a rural past.  

Thirteen years after first listening to “The Prophet”, the song is still ahead of its time.  While a prophet is never welcome in her own land, the prophet knows what it is to be a stranger and is well-suited to call for the welcome of her and other strangers into the world of recognition.
While the audio is not exactly the best (you’ll have to turn it up some), an audio post will likely follow in the next day or two.  It’s well worth the listen.

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, “All of You”, Standards in Norway, [ECM Records, 1989].

While a more restrained iteration of Jarrett’s style, it’s a solid, straightforward, wonderfully tight jazz standard.  The standard itself, as a musical form, is the synthesis of classical interpretation and contemporary improvisation, and among the ideal venues to encounter Jarrett’s versatility and lyricism.

Image Source: Claus Weber

Chuck D, Tear Down That Wall

A rare reprise of Public Enemy’s By The Time I Get To Arizona, Tear Down That Wall is nothing short of a call for listeners to heighten their awareness and exercise their often unused muscles of solidarity.  It’s also a denunciation of the complacency and blindness that have allowed us to remain indifferent to our common plights, which in a sense have allowed the kind of environment to develop where a law effectively separating and subjecting a class of people to the state’s police power can pass with popular support.

For us here at tirado/thrown, Tear Down That Wall, closes a loop that opened up in 1990, when Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet activated the mind of a reserved, confused, and otherwise rootless fourteen year old in Woodland Hills, CA into thinking about race, justice, history, and the emancipatory potential of music.  Chuck D and PE threw us a lifeline from across the country in the form of a magnetic tape spooled into a plastic cassette, courtesy of Def Jam Records. It couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. 

Twenty years later, Chuck D’s most recent gesture arrives at a more important juncture, where the State of Arizona has taken such egregious measures that effectively designates the state of exception as the rule, where anyone who vaguely resembles what the police considers an illegal immigrant (read: is of Latino or Latin American descent), is rendered suspect.  It’s a reminder that the work of solidarity is the ongoing production of our common humanity’s taking-place.  This work of solidarity sutures folds along and across lines of difference: language, gender, race, class, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and legal status.

Image: Guerilla Funk

Las Malas Amistades, “El Country”, Jardin Interior [Psych-o-Path/Honest Jon’s Records, 2006]

First listening to Jardin Interior in its entirety brought on feelings of relief and excitement.  Relief came in the form of Colombian-crafted indie rock textures that seared their way into the sensibilities of someone whose musical coming of age came in the era of Sebadoh, the Silver Jews, Smog, and Blackbean and Placenta tapes, but was left frustrated for well over a decade by the lack of something similar coming from Latin America or U.S. Latin@ communities.  Hearing Jardin Interior fulfilled a secretly held hope that one day there would come a Spanish-sung rejoinder to as freakish an album as Sebadoh’s Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock.  

“El Country” is  propelled by simple, repetitive staccato acoustic guitar phrases and a rich though equally repetitive vocal delivery rivaling Bill Callahan’s or Lou Barlow’s.  But there’s a still-intangible twist that accounts for the difference between musical sensibilities in Latin America and the United States.  Whether it has to do with variations in lyricism and their attendant relationships to rhythm in post-punk idioms is rather beyond our capacities.  All told, a lo-fi pastoral such as “El Country”, with its nostalgia-laden melancholy for a Colombia that appears to be evaporating as the narrator sings his lines with increasing disenchantment, completes our world just a little more here at tirado/thrown.

Image: Las Malas Amistades [myspace]