The original release of the Monomania EP happened last March–that is, in March of 2012. We re-released it as an LP last week, April 2nd, in the form of LP combining Child Bite’s two transcendentally brutal EP’s Vision Crimes/Monomania.
Yeah, that’s right. Two days before Monomania by Deerhunter went on sale over at 4AD. Karl called up Deerhunter’s manager a few weeks ago and was like, “Hey I just thought I’d call because –you know………I just thought you should know about this.” Reportedly, Deerhunter’s management was like: “Yeah. [Pause] That doesn’t surprise me. It’s a great title.”
Despite this somewhat inconvenient chronological coincidence, even here at Joyful Noise, we’re pretty excited about Deerhunter’s new album. So tonight I’ve been revisiting Bradford Cox’s Micromixes which you can find (at least the track listings) over at the Deerhunter blog.
For fans of Sonic Youth, Joyful Noise recommends Talk Normal. Click the picture to get a free download of their single “Bad Date”.
In the future, when social scientists study the mix tape phenomenon, they will conclude- in fancy language- that the mix tape was a form of “speech”, particular to the late twentieth century.
— (Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500 quoted by Thurston Moore on p. 28 of his book “Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture”
At a time when, he couldn’t afford to purchase singles Thurston Moore recorded mixtapes in Dan Graham’s living room. Here is the story of one such mixtape quoted (again) from Moore’s Mix Tape book:
“[In the early 80’s] My love Kim would come home from work each day, which was at Todd’s Copy Shop on Mott Street or waitressing at Elephant & Castle on Prince Street, and I’d be playing hardcore singles all day. I thine she even wrote some lyrics about her boyfriend [me] doing this. I felt slight guilty, but I also needed to hear these records in a more time-fluid way, and it hit me that I could make a killer mix tape of all the best songs on these records–and since they were all so whort and they all had the same kind of sound and energy, the mix tape would be a monolithic hardcore rush. As we had access to Dan [Graham’s] apartment [ie. where there was a library of records, and equipment to do dubs], I went up there and did just that. I wrote ‘H’ on one side, and ‘C’ on the other side. That night, while we were in bed, and after Kim had fallen asleep, I put the cassette on our stereo cassette player, dragged one of the little speakers over to the bed, and listened to the tape at ultra-low thrash volume…. For my birthday that year, Kim bought me a Walkman with a speaker built into it. This allowed me to have the Walkman right next to my pillow and play the ‘H/C’ mix tape at an even more intimate range…”
And so without further ado, Joyful Noise has assembled and presents to you (a close approximation) of….
H/C Mixtape*
So what we would do is on a Friday night–after consuming heroic doses of various illicit substances–we would call up our hero: the superhuman, the electric centaur. That is, Buzz Osbourne. And we would read into his voicemail, passages from the book. In retrospect, the whole procedure was almost like a strange form of prayer. Here’s an exemplary passage, chosen at random:
They are twins, fitly mated & as either gains control of the unfortunate subject, his soul withers away and decays, and at last dies out. The souls of half the human race leave them long before they die. “They cover all the skin of him that hath the plague, from his head even to his foot.” Even the raw flesh of the heart becomes unclean with it. Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the path of the molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?
For fans of Sonic Youth, Joyful Noise recommends Talk Normal. Click on the picture to download their single Bad Date, or go here to check out their new split 7″ with Thurston Moore.
“I only listen to cassettes.” -Thurston Moore
(from “This is not a mixtape.”)
A lot of people don’t understand the resurgence of cassettes in music culture. They’re ugly, mechanical and fragile; vinyl’s less-refined bastard cousin. Most people couldn’t even play a cassette if they wanted to, because barely anyone still owns a tape deck. But this exclusivity is a huge part of their appeal. It’s art, encrypted by its own obsolescence.
Cassettes have a frequency range which is limited compared to CDs and Vinyl. Unlike digital files, they don’t last forever. Cassettes are living objects that degrade a little every time you enjoy them. No matter how careful you are, after a certain number of plays, they will start to demagnetize and wear out.
For all of these reasons, Sonic Youth is a band that fits perfectly on cassette. The sonic limitations of the medium actually work in their favor. The tape saturation and hiss seem, not only apt, but essential–it’s hard to decouple the natural, background noise of the medium from the intentionally constructed noisy ambience created in the studio. And even after the tapes start to degrade, the music only gets more interesting. Similar to William Basinski’s disintegration loops, the strange aural qualities produced by the physical decomposition of the magnetic strip obscures the music, but resonates on the same frequency as Sonic Youth’s artistic ethos–an aesthetic of destruction as creation.
