living in oblivion | anything box

Living In Oblivion | Anything Box

You can't hide the pain,
I can see it scrawled on your empty face.
And I feel the hurt,
It's in the words you say, they make me want to...
Scream out to the world,
For taking life for granted and I know.
You are by my side when
I turn to hear you cry

I am so afraid of living in oblivion
Living in oblivion

Am I so blind?
With my eyes turned to a different time or hour.
At the end of the day,
When we both run down and our hopes are heavy...
Tell me what you will,
'Cause I've got to know the truth inside of you.
Can you hear what I say,
When I hold you and you scorn the day?

I am so afraid of living in oblivion
Living in oblivion

So I ask again,
Am I so alone and full of pride?
To never speak out...
This is my world, this is my world
Don't tell me now,
I won't feel those words, I won't feel the lies they tell
Can you hear my scream?
It's for everyone, for everyone...

I am so afraid of living in oblivion
Living in oblivion...

obscure substance

There's a cloud that hangs over you
And a chill when you walk in the room
And it's hard to believe this is what you've become
Preying on the fears of old and young

Now I am a reasonable man
And I'll help any way that I can
In the time that it takes us to change your ways
I'll watch over you everyday

Michael, you're my brother
But I'll never let you break your word again
I'll hurt you
And you know I can so please don't force me
Michael...

- excerpt from lyrics, Michael by Secession

During the 80s when I was a student at The Art Institute Of Chicago and getting my hands dirty with photography chemicals, soft pastels, and staying up all night in the studios to finish projects, I listened to tons of amazing music. No, not just bands like The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, and Talking Heads. Some of the most compelling and, frankly, most beautiful music came from bands whose memory sadly remained obscure up until today.

Most of us old farts do remember Duran Duran, Eurythmics, and all those others who were shooting stars that left luminescent trails in the stratosphere of pop and new wave that remain visible today to be discovered by the kids of parents who grew up bathed in the glow of those shooting stars.

But there were less shiny stars, though no less brilliant. New Wave bands like Secession, whose thrashing synth hip hop beat and lead male singer's haunting somber voice on my Walkman's headphones kept me company at 2 in the morning as I worked on my design project at school, resonated with richness, emotions, creativity, and originality - qualities that are agonizingly rare in today's far too self referential music landscape. Others, like DATA, Propaganda, and Visage, offered sounds so distinct and individualized that they easily embarrass the cacophony of barely talented bands and so-called artists today.

But thanks to YouTube and the stubbornness of us Generation X-ers to hold on to the music we lived, loved, and danced to, we can rediscover the genius and beauty that, you have to admit, transcend that decade known for its huge shoulder pads and hideous neon miniskirts and huge processed hair.

Crank up those headphones -- erm, earbuds -- and lose yourself in the obscure substance of seriously GOOD music.

"you must normalize..."

LCD Soundsystem is the musical side project of producer James Murphy, co-founder of dance-punk label DFA Records. The music of LCD Soundsystem is a mix of dance music and punk, along with elements of disco and other styles. LCD Soundsystem is particularly popular in Britain, with two albums reaching the top 40 of the UK Albums Chart...

- Wikipedia

This particular track, Get Innocuous, an uncompromising and surprisingly elegant composition of thrashing percussion, hypnotic synth base, and seductively masculine choral voice work, is among the featured tracks in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. The group earned tw0 2005 Grammy nominations for their talents in the electronica category, then another Grammy nomination in 2007 for best work in the Best Electronic/Dance Album arena, and that's on top of heaps of critical acclaim by some of the best music critics for influential publications like The Guardian and Time Magazine.

Dance in front of your screen at your own risk.

smooth operator: sade

I first discovered Sade in the early 80s. Back then there were many excellent bands, the competition for my ears was fierce in the arenas of new wave, punk, industrial dance, alternative, and American and British pop.

But Sade, in her own way, trumped them all on her own terms. Why? Because she was the exact opposite of all the exuberant, in-your-face dramatics of pop music. She had one of the rarest of qualities: cool.

This statuesque former model, part Nigerian and part English, possessed a smooth unwavering voice, a decidedly distant yet not icy personal style, and a unique talent to circumnavigate the limelight of paparazzi and other media intrusion that constantly subject us to the pummeling of celebrity gossip and drama of the entertainment world. When all we heard and saw (whether we want it or not) were the tabloid headlines of Whitney Houston and Madonna, nowhere to be seen was Sade. She simply made herself out to be too "boring" to sell millions of magazine copies for the publishers. Which in the end rendered her that much more intriguingly mysterious.

While the pop stars of the 80s often times dressed in the most outlandish ways to sustain the attention of whoreish media and fans, Sade had always been at the far end of the spectrum. She was almost always photographed in stark black, clean tailored lines, turtleneck sweaters, backless cocktail dresses that caressed her lean model's frame, long black silk gloves, dark trousers, hair slicked back to a long pony tail. Such style is eternal and can never be tethered to an era or decade, least of all the ostentatious and overripe 80s.

Sade's music, naturally, aurally extends and embodies this cool, confident style. Her forte was jazz, the iconic kind so easily recognized in its native atmosphere of smoky nightclub patronized by elegant elite clientele serviced by bartenders with combed back hair, starched white shirts, and waistcoasts. Subsequently she inflected her rhythms with African beats or subtle hip hop influences, but ultimately the sounds never shout at you and instead invite you to lounge and enjoy a nicely mixed martini, as smooth and intoxicating as Sade herself, her creamy voice crooning over the cradling bass and purring saxophone.

Cool incarnate is Sade. No one could, can, or can ever, touch her, even as she touches us.

redux deluxe

C'est Comme ça | Les Rita Mitsouko. 1986. Directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino.

aural fixation

^ Ero | David Garcet. One of the tracks featured on Danny Howells: Renaissance The Mix Collection.

IIRC the first Danny Howells CD I bought was, interestingly enough, at a music store in a shopping mall in Manila during the summer over 7 years ago. Aside from the homogeneity of the shoppers (mostly trendy privileged teenage kids of affluent parents) you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between this mall and any American suburban mall. Yeah, it was Danny Howells, Nubreed Global Underground, a 2 disc set.

> Go ahead, pick a city, any city. Or any place for that matter. Slip on your iPod buds and crank up Danny Howells' mixes and let it wash over you. Chicago, evening.

The cover was clean, stark white and featured the very hot, handsome British man Howells, clean shaven and shorn (he has since gone scruffy). I'd totally fuckin' hit it, I thought. But beyond his good looks, his music, how he worked it, was and probably will always be great pleasure for me. Many times it's my personal soundtrack to 21st century life. I listen to it while walking through downtown, riding the subway, or just lying in bed late into the night trancing. I even venture to say he's the equivalent of Carla and Franca Sozzani, the sister team responsible for the at once classical and innovative vision of Italian Vogue (of which Franca is the editor-in-chief) and a worldwide enterprise of retail and hospitality operations and services much touted for their precise, impeccable elegance and modernity for a discerning lifestyle (Carla runs all that).

My latest get from Howells - Renaissance The Mix Collection - was not bought in a mall, but purchased and downloaded from iTunes directly to my iPhone, just the way Howells would most likely approve of. As always, his reliable signature style carries on in this latest offering.

< Danny Howells: good looks, good music. Hit the pic for his official site. Turn your volume down first then gradually crank it up and dance.

Like the Sozzani sisters' tastes and vision, Howells maintains a consistency in his mix of catchy yet restrained synthetic, ambient tunes. His style is controlled, even, and tellingly confident in its restraint. Whereas Sasha, another dj I love, concentrates on bravura like shiny gold tinged with ecstacy to energize his crowds, Howells strings his tunes together like individual pearls, patiently fashioning them into ambient necklaces of sound. I am just as much in bliss experiencing them lying still as I am dancing to them. The individual tracks he chooses are at once unobtrusive and potent with rhythm. His mixes are rare amongst dj's for their elegance and steady transfusion of groove while allowing each carefully selected track the respectful space it deserves.

Howells brings a pleasingly orchestrated, tuneful balance of tech house to the dance floor and steady fuel to the iPod earbud wearing bodies trekking across our techno infused global landscapes.

ocarina of beauty

^ A quintet performs Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven on their iPhones.

I shelled out the .99 cents last night for the Ocarina app for the iPhone. It's really charming! You can practically teach yourself to play a tune. I learned how to play 'Mary had a little lamb'. Then it has a feature that pictures a 3D earth you can turn with the flick of a finger, with tiny points of light, each representing another person playing their 'flute'. Whenever someone plays it you can actually hear their tune in real time, the echoing quality of the flute lending it a rather haunting atmosphere, and a very pretty, tubular beam of blue light with little green circles emanate from where they are, whether it be New York, France, England, Australia, Japan, or wherever.

Last night I heard someone from the U.S. playing some tune from J.S. Bach, but can't remember which. The most common tunes played at the moment are 'Amazing Grace' and 'Taps' (probably because it's Veterans Day here in the U.S.). Of course, when I play my tune my blue beam of light and green circles emanate from southern California, too. Must learn to play other tunes.

There's something beautiful about the synthesis of man made cutting edge technology and using it to watch and listen to tiny points of light from around the earth set against a vast blackness, each point of light representing a fellow human being, each waiting their turn for your eyes and ears while you wait your turn for theirs.

A strange and poetic kind of connectedness.

deep inside the music, literally

"In conjunction with Creative Time, Playing the Building is an installation by David Byrne that transformed a 9,000 square foot abandoned room in Lower Manhattan's Battery Maritime Building into an instrument for the summer. An antique pump organ controls devices that create sounds using the building's infrastructure, including heating pipes, metal beams and pillars.

For a special event last month, curator Mark Beasley invited accomplished musicians to perform an improvisational piece with the building. The result is a captivating musical experience."

- coolhunting.com

*Sigh* ...I wish I could be there, in that building, deep inside it as a musical instrument, deep inside the music.