The World Is Full

of a number of things

The Lantern Bearers, Maxfield Parish 1908

Whoever reaches into a rosebush may seize a handful of flowers; but no matter how many one holds, it's only a small portion of the whole. Nevertheless, a handful is enough to experience the nature of the flowers. Only if we refuse to reach into the bush, because we can't possibly seize all the flowers at once, or if we spread out our handful of roses as if it were the whole of the bush itself - only then does it bloom apart from us, unknown to us, and we are left alone.

~ Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back; The Memoirs of Lou Andreas-Salomé, 1951


To mark the passing of the God-child, Brian Wilson, Hayley and I watched that 2024 The Beach Boys documentary. We wished we hadn’t. Mike Love! What a fucking bastard! It turns out that Brian’s “genius” was just a PR invention, but if it meant anything there were two in that band. Brian, who spent 90 hours in 5 studios making the music for ‘Good Vibrations’, and his gifted poet cousin Mike, who dictated this timeless verse to his wife as he drove to the studio.

I'm pickin' up good vibrations (Good vibrations, bop-bop)
She's giving me excitations (Excitations, bop-bop)

Reason enough to sue Brian for half the royalties! The egregious Love, in his The Beach Boys, stage-manages the appearance of only those celebrities and nonentities prepared to agree with his thesis, or at least not dispute it. So we get some oafish critic, too young to know anything about his subject, and the guy from OneRepublic, a ‘band’ who sound to me like Ed Sheeran sitting in with Mumford and Sons. We hear from Don Was, who’s never made anything that reminded me of the Beach Boys, and a signifying Janelle Monae (you can tell she’s there for Brian even if Mike won’t let her say it directly), and there’s Lindsey Buckingham, who’s earned the right to be there, and wisely says nothing that can be interpreted as supporting Mike’s thesis. The movie is also weirdly protective of Murry Wilson, while over-exposing him, so that Brian’s deafness in one ear has to go unmentioned. Burn before watching.

Here’s one of my favourite Brian Wilson songs, ‘Girl Don’t Tell Me’, from 1966. Carl Wilson sings lead, and there are no harmonies, nor are there any fancy modulations, yet the song predicts Pet Sounds. Brian wrote it on his honeymoon with Marilyn, perhaps explaining its rare confidence; the lyric’s a neatly plotted coming-of-age-story. I first heard this song on a second-hand single in 1991, around the time I wrote the songs that became The Puddle’s Songs For Emily Valentine, and it served as one of the touchstones of what a pop song could be, both in its problem-to-solution lyric and the way the melody stretches out inside the harmonic bounds of the chord change.

The Beach Boys made a lot of good music without Brian, once they had no choice, but it’s never been as essential to me as those songs he wrote in his days of inspiration, a period which essentially covered the ‘60’s, and came to a very rocky close in the following decade.

I had long planned to write an ironic essay in defense of Mike Love, with this photograph as exhibit A, but that seems completely impossible after watching The Beach Boys.

In my opportunistic way of keeping my ear on new music that can carry some meaning for me, I rely most on a couple of trusted sources who dig in areas adjacent to my own interests and have a higher discovery turn-over than I. There’s Dave Moore somewhere in the suburban jungles of North America (I think) and here at home there’s Chris Philpot at Ephemeral, who covers both the local charts and the cool stuff that comes in from overseas and has an ear for both pop and its more exciting alternatives. You can rely on the generation whose early adult years were spent with nu metal, d’n’b, dreampop and rap, to feel their way into the more exciting of the modern musical artforms, often the extensions of those forms under new technologies. Last week Chris introduced me to Canadian duo Purity Ring with these beguiling words —

”In addition to making the best remix on Deftones’ White Pony remix album (they took on “Knife Prty”), Purity Ring introduced me to the sub-genre ‘witch house’ and I will always be grateful for that. What is witch house? I have no idea. But I like Purity Ring, so I think this might be it.”

I liked this too, but didn’t at first recognize ‘Many Lives’ as Witch House, which is a lumbering, majestic dark trap genre; ‘Many Lives’ is, rather, spry 2nd wave hyperpop, babydoll-voiced, like dark Magdalena Bay. But then, Deftones are the most witch house-adjacent of nu metal bands (and far harder to define than that, but it’s a start), their sound bristles with horripilation effects, mostly achieved by rock techniques rather than pure electronica. Here’s the Purity Ring remix of ‘Knife Prty’.

This led me to listen again to King Night (2010) by SALEM, the definitive OG witch house album. It’s Majestic dark synth music from fans of Houston trap (here are their Gucci Mane remixes), Gary Numan and the Cocteau Twins, and for me works best when it’s instrumental music, or with Heather Marlatt’s ambiguous voice draped over the songs in a woozy LA Vampires style.

Purity Ring began as an online collaboration, producer Corin Roddick sending Megan James files to add vocals to; Wikipedia, correctly, lists them as a “pop band” and their albums are released by 4AD, the Cocteau Twins’ label. ‘stillness in woe’, the final track from their 2nd album Another Eternity, shows another side of the band, with a colder vocal and more folkish melody than ‘Many Lives’.

Meet me in the blue bed, I'll be drying out your flaws
And clawing out to cause my knees to tremble
Meet me in the back shed, I'll be hanging up the knives
Humming melodies that rhyme, building castles out of shovels
Hang my head about as if we never had the time
To draw it on the walls, what's all the trouble?
Push my mind around as if it's warming up your hand
As if it's softer than the land, all silked and supple
Don't be afraid if it's a little bit close
I built a kingdom of your throats, I'm seeing double
Don't be afraid if there's no wind in my hair
There's a stillness left in there, I'm seeing double

There’s something about this folk-trap sound of Purity Ring’s that reminds me of Lil Bo Weep (AKA Unaloon), who made the coldest, purest music in existence on the theme of woe, of her alienation from life and from joy and search for other worlds.

Winona Green died of a drug overdose in 2022, weakened by long struggles with PTSD, depression, anorexia and addiction, and it’s a miracle that she was able to make the music she did; listening to her Spotify profile is like visiting an overgrown grave, no-one has yet curated a '“best of” for this true original. It’s when you listen to the tracks on Soundcloud instead that you notice all the flowers left in comments.

There’s only one rock track, as far as I know, in the Lil Bo Weep oeuvre, but it’s brilliant, as good as anything this fast, this short can get, and a prized example of humour in the face of despair.

I can’t resist buying 2nd hand early-2000’s R’n’B CDs when I can, to study the pre-history of the modern dance music that moves me. A while back I bought Shaznay Lewis’s debut album Open for $1. I didn’t know she was in All Saints, I was never a fan, but there are a couple of points of interest; the better tracks (which sound like All Saints songs with better singing) were cowritten with Rick Nowels, who cowrote Lana del Rey’s Honeymoon a decade later. The most interesting track is ‘Intro / Open’, with a sped-up track and glitchy production that’s ahead of its time. If the whole album had been produced like this we’d still be talking about it.

A much more satisfying purchase, also from the UK, Thank You, the 2nd album by Jamelia (2004), features her very familiar disco hit ‘Superstar’ (her cover of a Danish hit by Christine Milton, ‘Superstar’ went to #1 in New Zealand and Australia; Milton’s version is chunkier and more electro, and in no way inferior) but gives solid pleasure all the way through, every track is a convincing new variation on hip hop-based dance pop (note the faux-scratching in ‘Superstar’) and the rhythmic detail in the arrangements is masterful.

Things only fall off a little when we get to Thank You’s bonus tracks, and that’s because they’re experimental works that are attempting to predict future sounds; the final track, ‘Antidote’, sounds like proto-plugg’n’b, with 2004 trap beats{!} and densely multitracked vocals, like the blueprint for something Mona Evie would be getting up to much more recently.

The other mighty totara to fall in the forest of popular music last week was Sylvester Stewart, AKA Sly Stone. I’m not a big fan of funk, or ska, or any rhythmic feel that’s too abruptly stop-and-start, but a budget copy of the ‘Luv ‘N Haight/Family Affair’ single was one of the first singles I owned, because it seemed promisingly strange and was as cheap as me. I used to put it on when I wanted to hear something more dark and dirty and dangerous than, say, The Doors. It always hit the spot.

After Sly’s departure, Joshua Minsoo Kim posted this 1969 “deep Sly Cut” on twitter.

The A-side is credited to Sylvester Stewart, so why is Eric Siday’s name on this? Siday was a British-American pioneer of electro-acoustic music, who commissioned the first percussion synthesizer from Robert Moog. So that’s his voice we hear on ‘Catwoman’. The riff and drumming, though, is probably Sly’s. I think it likely that he’s paid for Siday’s participation, and his expensive synthesizer and time-consuming technical skill, by giving him the B-side credit rather than paying a flat fee.

As I write it seems likely that soon Trump’s military aircraft will be darkening the skies above Tehran in a mad attempt to exploit the failure-madness of Benjamin Netanyahu and bring about “regime change”. Iran has long been governed by horrible people, but also has a long history of civilization, and it’s always seemed perverse to me that the West has backed Iran’s enemy Saudi Arabia, equally horribly governed but with only a short history of too-much-money, in its proxy-on-proxy wars. In the olden days Iran was known as Persia, and Persian New Zealander CHAII (here, like me, from the age of 8) was my favourite in the electronica category for her accelerationist fusion of modern beats and vocal styles with Persian traditional sounds across her 2024 album Safar.

So I tuned in when Chaii turned up on RNZ’s Music 101 Mixtape, discussing her art and playing her favourites, and was impressed by her choices and insights into other artists and the discussion of her own practice and sound. Here it is. Chaii got 7 songs in, most people manage 5 or so. Most of them are killer tracks that I haven’t heard before, and no-one’s ever managed that before. Here’s one of those, J Cole’s ‘No Role Modelz'.

Algorithm Goes (psych)Pop! - The Pink Floyd Research Group, by Luke Haines & Peter Buck