Getting intimate with M.A.N.D.Y.

At a certain juncture of electronic music fetishism, control freakishness reigns. Whose track is it? Which remix is it? Fandom becomes curatorship and curatorshipbecomesgatekeeperpretention. Which brings us to mix discs. Everything we love started with the mix—we’re trusting the DJ, in his finite wisdom, to take us someplace we don’t necessarily know but we hope we’ll like. Paradoxically, the DJ got us into this in the first place, but we no longer take his word for it, thinking ourselves superior pickers for our own lives’ soundtracks. In this era of personalized playlists, a mix executed wrongly can be an affront to the long tail. Sonic fascism even. What’s so easy in the club context—just listening—becomes an ego-banishment exercise on headphones.

But goddamn, M.A.N.D.Y. can select ‘em. Better than you or me, guaranteed. Whether it’s a Body Language cut, their Fabric 38 or M.A.N.D.Y. at the Controls, Berlin heads Patrick Bodmer and Philipp Jung bring a sense of maturity, smarts and cohesion to the mix that is rare these days. Renaissance is no exception.

>>>R.E.A.D. M.O.R.E.<<<

Best of San Diego…

Pho, golf balls, MRSA and makout sessions…

Check out the Greek mythology-themed Best Of section in this week’s San Diego CityBeat. I contributed to the Heracles, Demeter and Aphrodite sections. Kinda sketchy.

Harmonia 76 – Remixes

You know the story: The year is 1976. Brian Eno hasn’t yet collaborated with Bowie on Low, and is looking for a project. Eno had already shown huge Krautrock interest with Roxy Music and (possibly apocryphal) quotes from the era have him calling Harmonia “the world’s most important rock band” at the time. What is clear: He loved the band, a group composed of musicians from Neu! and Cluster. And so as the leaves in Forst, Germany, turned from green to gold, Eno and the boys lay down what would become Tracks & Traces.

And then it was forgotten. Not to be heard from until 1997 when the original masters were discovered in a climate-controlled space capsule hovering over Berlin. (OK, I made that part up.) Either way, they were released by Rykodisc more than a decade ago. And rereleased this year on Grönland Records. And the results—if you don’t already have them in your amniotic playlist—are pretty much as to be expected. Wistful, chuggy, fun, sad, corny, shimmering, eschatological—and above all, pregnant with the sounds would set Detroit and Manchester afire in just a few short years. Durutti Column fans, this is the Nag Hammadi Codex.

ENO ENO ENO ENO ENO @ Resident Advisor–>

I hate waiters

In partial response to:  100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do

I hate service. I hate it. All kinds. Cashiers. Salespeople. Bartenders. But most of all waiters.  Even the best waiters.

Let me explain. I am a miserable sack of shit who hates both A) food and B) people and takes my hatred of food out on the people who bring it to me.

I have IBS and a million food issues and probably an eating disorder and I’m lactose intolerant and a sort-of vegan and besides I’m probably a non-taster (the opposite end of the spectrum from a supertaster) and so everything I eat tastes to me blah and whatever and upsets my stomach no matter what.

I hate eating out. I prefer to eat my grim sustenance in the form of bran cereal soggy with Lactaid. But social norms (the ones I bother to fake, anyway) often require group meals. And then the fun begins.

A server is another chance for an error to enter the already unpleasant chain of events that leads my food from a greasy unsanitary kitchen to my miserable broken-down intestines.

“Does that have a lot of oil in?”

“No way, Jose!”

“Can I get it without cheese?”

“You betcha!”

“Okay, I’ll have that.”

(Meal arrives. It’s a brick of cheese floating in a bowl of oil.)

Brings out the Tiga in you…

Tiga is a lot of things—a genre ironist, a gender jockey, a genius debatably—but subtle he is not. On his latest, Ciao!, he waxes obvious about information overload “All I feel is in this data stream / I see the eyes in the computer screen /Misinformation is surrounding me / It brings me down, I’m on my knees”—but the big joke is that song itself (“Beep Beep Beep”) is frenetically overproduced mess of Purple One invocations, Basement Jaxx snipes and inch-deep pop profundity.

Enter Loco Dice with a dub that doesn’t even deliver anything close to the song’s hook until about six minutes deep into the cut. A persistent little string flick and some mechanically feisty bongos building to Tiga himself exhaling are all that remain. Now, I love taking something overdone and underdoing it for effect—but this is the remix equivalent of Garfield Minus Garfield.

Parisian mnml producer Kaine goes the opposite route—instead of dialing back Tiga’s enthusiasm—he organizes it. What was funky and goofy on the original becomes all New Romantic lush and dark. Tiga James Sontag’s “beep-beep-beep” refrain stops being a reminder of technological interruption and starts to be the sexy pulse of the cyborg nightlife. The message is lost, but who cares? This B bangs. [<-----------read more @ RA------------>]