Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop

Book Review
Playboy.com
July 2008

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Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop
by Emma Pettit
Black Dog Publishing, 144 pages, Paperback $29.95
Reviewed by Patrick Sisson

In an essay at the end of Old Rare New, music critic Simon Reynolds observes that, “used CD stores really are like the mass graves of mass culture.” It’s funny, but it also puts things into perspective. Unlike the specialty record stores held up as symbols of the cruel and unfeeling march of digital culture, used CD stores truly are commerce on life support.

Old Rare New, a massive chronicle of vinyl culture edited by Emma Pettit, arrives at a time when angst over the decline of record shopping is chronic. This well-illustrated volume of interviews and essays by critics, collectors, musicians, DJs and record store owners is as eclectic, fetishistic (and occasionally elitist) as its subject matter would suggest. The focus is on personal stories of eager collectors and dusty vinyl dens, along with their reaction to file-sharing, eBay and Amazon, the “ghost record clerk to the world” according to contributor Byron Coley. Bob Stanley’s piece, “Give Me Your Zonophone Number” dissects how previous technological sea changes like electrified studios and vacuum tubes altered recorded music. Chicago psych lynchpin Steve Krakow shares his wish list of rare vinyl, both extravagant and endearing.

Clearly, the case for vinyl’s worth has been made. In between album cover porn and photos of record stores, a chorus of those quoted in the book decries vinyl’s demise, while a handful lists the positives of the net’s unfathomable depths. Just as the surface thrills of extraordinary cover art can be a reflection of the wild music inside, the record-to-MP3 shift is symbolic of a change in the way people collect, consume and conceive music. Old Rare New dutifully documents vinyl’s past and talks about its future — which ironically includes some thriving online retail — enough to avoid being a complete requiem. It would have been a welcome addition to engage, envision or interview the digital future, no matter how over-compressed and tinny it sounds.

Interview: The Notwist

Interview
Pitchfork
July 2008
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Prague’s Palác Akropolis, the concert venue where the Notwist started it’s current tour, is located in a patchwork neighborhood of slightly faded buildings which sit in the shadows of the Žižkov TV tower, a spaceship-like structure and the lone eyesore in the city’s quaint skyline. It’s a fitting contrast for the German band, which has arrived at a unique fusion of pastoral beauty and quirky electronics after nearly two decades of performing together. The band’s latest, the somber The Devil, You + Me, builds on the group’s breakout 2002 album Neon Golden with an even richer sound, due in part to contributions from the experimental Andromeda Mega Express Orchestra. The band’s guitarist and singer Markus Acher spoke to Pitchfork backstage during sound check in Prague, and as the band’s oddly soothing German GPS system occasionally spoke up in the background, he discussed Dax Pierson’s influence on the new album, his struggles with singing in English, and how you, too, can book the Acher family band for your next birthday party.

Pitchfork: Back in 1999, you wrote a handful of songs for a film called Absolute Giganten, which was about German youth trying to escape small town life and see the world. Coming from Weilheim, a town of about 20,000 people, does that theme resonate with you?
Markus Acher: It’s a theme that is always present. In a way, it was also the reason to start making music. It was such a small town, so conservative and so boring, so we were really addicted to any input from other places, anything that made the world bigger, like lots of American music. It’s not that urgent anymore, but it’s still a feeling I know very well. On the new record, there are still lots of these sorts of images.

Pitchfork: You guys haven’t left. You still live there and Alien Transistor, your new studio, is nearby. What keeps you grounded in the area?
Markus Acher: I guess it’s the knowledge that it’s very good to stay with something and work on it. We couldn’t have done what we did musically, with so many groups, if we went somewhere else. Everybody would have gone somewhere else and we wouldn’t have worked together. It became interesting for us to tour and to have this kind of base.

Pitchfork: Your father, a musician who plays various instruments, taught you and Micha when you were kids. You two also play with him right now in the New Orleans Dixie Stompers. Can you tell me a little bit about that group and what it’s like playing with your father?
Markus Acher: Micha and me started playing music on recorders, the typical children’s instrument. We started playing Bavarian folk music, and then my father taught me guitar and Micha bass and trumpet. My dad is a big jazz fan, especially New Orleans swing and Dixie. His big dream was that him and his two sons would form a Dixieland band. He plays trombone and Micha already learned trumpet. I learned clarinet, but then I switched, because I didn’t like it very much, and started learning drums for the band. [The Stompers] actually started around the same time as the Notwist.
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Cowboy culture takes root in ČR: Czechs take on the Wild West in weekend shooting events

Feature
Prague Post
June 25th, 2008
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His spurs jangling and his hat tilted low, the cowboy snubbed out his cigarette, adjusted his holster and stepped to the line. He wasted little time. His Winchester rifle flashed, coughing up bitter gun smoke and spitting spent cartridges in a wobbly arc toward the back brim of his hat. He then pumped his shotgun, squeezing out a resonating series of booms and littering the grass with plastic shells. He finished by flashing twin Colt revolvers, drilling his targets in quick succession.

Until the dull beep of a palm-size timer signaled the end of this barrage of bullets, it could have been any stock close-up from a silver-screen cowboy serial. But this particular scene, repeated numerous times at Přelouč’s Sportovně střelecký klub shooting range in May, was just a snapshot of members of the Czech Republic’s Asociace westernových střelců (AWS) at a Cowboy Action Shooting event.

Part target shooting and part re-enactment, Cowboy Action Shooting (CAS) is an international gun sport wherein participants fire replica weapons and dress in vintage gear.

Most days, the 120 or so Czech members of AWS are computer specialists, consultants, truck drivers, police officers or other everyday occupations. But, during select weekends each year, they don vests, boots, leather gear and cowboy hats and become gunslingers known by nicknames like Gatling, Thunderman, Big Bison or Widowmaker.

Josef Minhola, a 41-year-old truck driver from south Moravia, thought nothing of driving for hours to join his fellow shooters at Přelouč. He loves Dances With Wolves, and made all of his gear himself, including a pair of leather chaps.
“I’m very happy to be in this group,” he said. “I like the romance and the atmosphere. It’s my hobby.”
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Portishead: Do Not Disturb

Feature
XLR8R
May 2008
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It felt absolutely, resolutely endless. Gothic grey streaks and storm clouds splayed for miles across the Bristol, U.K. skyline, comprising the daily view from Portishead’s perch at the top of band member Adrian Utley’s stately, two century-old Georgian house. Camped out in the top two floors of studio space, the band was entrenched in an interminable stretch of music-making, broken occasionally by talking, fiddling with vintage instruments, and drinking tea.

Progress was slow, and the trio was frustrated. They pined for ideas and concepts, abstracts which often felt as tangible as white sand slipping through bony fingers. The self-imposed pressure was evident. When the group first approached Island Records about making another album–their first new material in nearly a decade–in early 2007, they had seven finished tracks. A year later, they were back down to six.

The band struggled to find a new sound–one that didn’t just revisit the dark trip-hop blueprint that made them famous–while grappling with unease at the state of the modern world and its wars.

“I feel like Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live,” says band member Geoff Barrow of his sense of disconnection from society. “I feel that if I put glasses on, I would be surrounded by a bunch of aliens.”
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True Norwegian Black Metal

Book Review
Playboy.com
May 2008

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True Norwegian Black Metal
by Peter Beste
Vice Books, 208 pages, Hardcover $60.00
Reviewed by Patrick Sisson

The members of the seminal Norwegian black metal band Mayhem remembered their former vocalist Dead, who committed suicide in 1991, in their own way. According to legend, bits of his skull were made into necklaces the band would later wear on stage.

The extreme form of metal music that emerged in Norway during the late ’80s and early ’90s lends itself to hyperbolic and hysterical media (first thoroughly chronicled in the 1998 cult classic Lords of Chaos). Any scene where piles of decapitated sheep heads are considered stage props and whose musicians have names like Necrobutcher and Count Grishnackh usually does. What makes True Norwegian Black Metal, a collection of essays and the work of American photographer Peter Beste, not just freakish but intriguing is that it resists tabloid urges and lets the images and artists speak for themselves.

Beste became an insider after a decade of traveling to Norway and documenting bands, and his photos are striking. Black-and-white shots of pale, scowling singers in corpsepaint and leather, walking through moss-covered woods or icy wasteland, make Alice Cooper and Gene Simmons look like cartoons in comparison. Beste doesn’t candy-coat or excuse the dark music’s literary touchstones — a blend of dark philosophy, Pagan rites, Satanism and Lovecraft and Tolkien mythology — or criminal past. His introduction discusses the spate of metal-related church burnings in Norway in the early ’90s. An in-depth timeline ties together the music’s myriad dark influences.

An essay by Slayer magazine editor Metalion talks about the origins of the movement and Dead’s violent suicide as well as the murder of bandmate Euronymous, which form a tragic thread in the story of Mayhem. “The distinction between fantasy and reality was becoming blurred,” Metalion wrote of the period after the suicide. There is little critical analysis of the actual music, so in some ways the book presupposes readers are already fans. But the strength of the personalities and images collected in True Norwegian Black Metal make it more a vivid portrait of an extreme subculture than fanboy raving.

Steinski: What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective

Review
Earplug
May 2008

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Tight mixes, pithy dialogue, and rapid-fire vocal samples are apropos for his day-job as an ad man, but it’s Steve Stein’s delivery and sense of humor that have made him a crate-digging icon. Better known as Steinski, the DJ/producer launched his landmark “Lessons” mixes with Douglas “Double Dee” DiFranco in the early ’80s. Challenging copyright and mocking pop culture, What Does It All Mean? collects his many sampling milestones alongside an animated Solid Steel mix and two decades’ worth of solo work. “It’s Up to You (Television Mix)” — a loony and literal drumbeat to war featuring the first President Bush’s platitudes alongside media criticism and Mario Savio’s revolutionary bile — remains relevant and hilarious. Meanwhile, his Kennedy-assassination collage “The Motorcade Sped On” and somber 9/11 record “Number Three on Flight Eleven” show the Lessig-loving blogger is still in control of the podium.

Ellen Allien: SOOL

Review
Earplug
May 2008

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Breezy and incessant, “Einsteigen” kicks off Ellen Allien’s latest full-length with impatient beeps and the sound of commuters jostling inside Berlin’s Alexanderplatz station. It’s an appropriate intro, one that marks SOOL as the work of an artist in transit. While Allien’s recent Boogy Bytes mix was subdued, bubbling, and spectral — many shades removed from Berlinette’s techno-pop — SOOL often sounds like a phantasmal vision of minimal dance. Airy brushstrokes and pneumatic beats are in danger of fading away; on songs like “Out,” a solitary beat is augmented with pops, percussive strikes, and spare vocal flourishes. Going this minimal often makes a record fall flat, but, as the reams of metallic scrapes and the melancholy woodwind melody of “Zauber” indicate, Allien and co-producer AGF have lovingly sculpted what remains, creating a record with surprising space, texture, and color. It’s not always the most engaging journey, but the destination remains intriguing enough.

M83: Teen Dreams

Feature
XLR8R
April 2008
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What, exactly, does it mean when you’re 26, it’s 2008, and you still harbor a schoolboy’s crush on Molly Ringwald?

If you’re Anthony Gonzalez, the French producer behind M83, it means picking album-cover models is easy.

“When we were at the modeling agency in New York, I saw this ginger girl,” he says, grinning as he refers to the redheaded Ringwald dead-ringer on the cover of his new album Saturdays=Youth (Mute). “I knew we needed her.”

A cast of high school stereotypes straight from The Breakfast Club–preppie, geek, goth–surround the girl on the cover, creating an instantly recognizable homage to John Hughes’ 1985 classic. “I really fell in love with the atmosphere of teen movies,” Gonzalez confesses, as we sit in his recording studio in Antibes, France, which is adorned with framed posters of Pretty in Pink, Say Anything…, and The Breakfast Club. “The soundtracks were perfect and the characters were so charismatic.”

The posters are only part of the inspiration for Saturdays=Youth, a collection of ’80s-inspired electronic tracks that’s a hazy, grandiose tribute to adolescence. The record magnifies the indulgent synths, exaggerated emotions, and campy vocals of previous efforts to the power of 10, while exploring the most iconic soundtrack category of all time: high school.
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Osborne Again: Ghostly’s polymath musician/mechanic returns

Interview
Earplug
May 2008

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Ypsilanti, Michigan, resident Todd Osborn is often (semi-jokingly) compared to MacGuyver. Not only has the producer made scores of excellent house, techno, and drum ‘n bass records, but he also once designed weapons for the Air Force (“I truly cannot talk about details of that because of security clearances I’ve signed,” he says). What’s more, a list of his current projects includes voice work for a GPS system, remaking vintage Frank Lloyd Wright lamps, and “hopefully” learning falconry. This month, he’ll also find time to drop the rich-sounding, classically inspired house and techno trip Osborne, his full-length debut on Ghostly International’s Spectral Sound label. Earplug contributor Patrick Sisson interviewed Osborn via email, and was privy to the gear head’s take on vintage analog equipment, the blessing and curse of technology, and the awesome firepower of the Rephlex roster.

Earplug: We heard you’ve been working on a hovercraft for the last few years. Will it be done soon, and will it be able to beat up Aphex Twin’s tank?
Todd Osborne: No, it won’t be done for quite a while. It’s been very slow going. If I had a bunch of money, I’d have it done tomorrow, but that would take the fun out of building it and the creativeness of finding a cheap or free solution to a seemingly expensive problem. Richard and I won’t battle each other; we’ll combine forces for the Rephlex Disco Land/Air/Sea Assault battalion.

EP: With your mechanical and electronic background, how often do you alter your equipment? Do Detroit-area producers come knocking on your door looking for a repairman?
TO: I’ve built gear from scratch, but not my own ideas — just copying something that’s already made, but that’s hard to find or too expensive or not quite the sound I want. The last thing I built was a talk box like Roger from Zapp used to use. Besides those things, I mod[ify] gear sometimes. It’s always older analog gear, because it’s so easy to switch out resistors and potentiometers and get unique sounds. There are a lot of people, local and worldwide, I find and fix gear for, but I’m sure they wouldn’t want me to mention their names. I pretty much do it for fun, not money, and I get to play with and take apart — and once in a while get samples from — amazing gear I could never afford otherwise.
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Four Tet’s Ring Tones: Kieran Hebden makes “pummeling” music on new EP

Interview
Earplug
April 2008

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The mosaic of Kieran Hebden’s musical narrative is one of constant, relentless evolution. From his collaborations as part of Fridge to the ever-mutating sound of his Four Tet moniker and his inspired improvisational playdates with legendary drummer Steve Reid, the UK-based producer/performer re-invents any genre he’s exploring. For his expansive new Ringer EP, Hebden swapped his usually dense, cascading rhythms for something more streamlined and club-friendly. The result is a set of dynamic and effusive techno-inspired rhythms that do more with 30 minutes than most sitcoms. Earplug’s Patrick Sisson dialed Hebden up in London to discuss dinner dates with Caribou, getting into the right headspace for Ringer, and the benefits of befriending a Brazilian brewery.

Earplug: Since you recorded Everything Ecstatic, you’ve been collaborating with different people, trying new things, and going in new directions. Were you looking for something specific?
Kieran Hebden: After the Everything Ecstatic tour, I felt like it was time for something different. As luck would have it, I’d met Steve Reid a few months before. We got on straight away — did two shows the weekend we met. After that, we realized this was something we were going to take much further.

EP: How has he influenced your music?
KH: I’ve learned so much about rhythm from him. He plays this steady, 4/4 pulse all the time. For me, improvisation, rather than being some quest for freedom, is more about music being something fluid… I wanted people to get a slice of where my musical head was at that day. The stuff I’ve done with Steve, like the songs we just recorded in New York coming out later this year, don’t have any rigid format or compositions. They’ve just got set melodies and ideas and then we go into the studio and capture where they’re at now.
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