GEETA DAYAL

A new review by me in Frieze d/e, in English and in German.

I’ll be starting a new column for Frieze about the history of electronic music. The first installment should launch this coming week, and I’m very excited about it. It was a huge amount of work, as these pieces generally are, but worth it.

Also stay tuned for big pieces in Cabinet and various upcoming issues of Frieze, a guest spot at Ubuweb, and more.

And some big news: I’m moving back to San Francisco on January 1st.

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It is snowing outside, and it’s still October.

I’ll be in London from November 2-10, and Berlin from November 10-16. Get in touch if you’re there too.

And here’s another guest post I wrote on the global reach of disco, for Wired‘s Beyond the Beyond.

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Some new pieces:

There’s a review by me of the recent Angus MacLise retrospective in New York, in the October issue of Frieze.

And there’s a big review by me of the book Sound Souvenirs, in Current Musicology, an academic journal.

No links to either, I’m afraid–print-only!

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I’m guest-blogging at Wired this month, at the invitation of the wonderful Bruce Sterling.

Here’s a little introductory post.

And here’s a big post by me on Bollywood and disco’s international appeal.

Writing the next post now. . . stay tuned.

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A massive 3000-word article I wrote for Frieze on the late, great Conrad Schnitzler, featuring interviews with Cluster, Thomas Fehlmann, and many more. Writing this piece was a real labor of love, and I’m glad it’s out there.

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Rare and wonderful footage of Brian Eno in the 1970s, soundtracked by “King’s Lead Hat” and interspersed with paintings by Russell Mills from the book More Dark than Shark. It’s a commercial, of sorts, that originally aired on British TV, for the 1986 compilation More Blank than Frank:

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I found this hilarious graph on the back of one of my Muzak LPs, titled Muzak: Music of the ’80s:

Check it out! It’s linear!

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I just found this on an old hard drive–an article I wrote about Matmos, five years ago, for Res magazine. I haven’t looked at this piece since 2006; it made me chuckle when I read it. I wish I still had the photos that went with the story in the magazine, but for now this’ll do. Hope you like it.

MATMOS

by Geeta Dayal

[Originally published in Res, May 2006]

“We knew we wanted to collaborate with snails, but snails aren’t the loudest thing ever,” explains Drew Daniel, half of the San Francisco band Matmos. “Unless you wanted to step on them, and that’s not cool!”

Snails aren’t a particularly out-there choice of sonic inspiration for Daniel and his partner Martin Schmidt, who have been making music since 1997 under the Matmos moniker. Their 2001 opus A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, for instance, sampled the gruesome whooshing sounds of liposuction surgery, hearing aids, rat cages, human skulls, and crayfish nerve tissue.

Matmos’ fifth full-length album, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, is a collection of loving sonic portraits of various figures admired by the duo—a motley assortment of people, including the legendary disco DJ Larry Levan, the wily philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who inspired the title of the record), the Germs singer Darby Crash, and the mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith, who just so happened to be an avid collector of snails. The album is accompanied by a lavish booklet of portraits especially commissioned for the record, by various luminaries including the comic book artist Daniel Clowes.

“In each case, it was about the individual–trying to find some object for sound source ideas that seemed to really say something about that person, but also yielded something musically compelling,” explains Daniel. “I know that on paper, what we’re trying to do can sound like we’re trying to be perverse, we’re trying to get the shock reaction. . . in each case, there’s a reason why the sound resonated with the subject of the song.” [click to continue…]

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I’ve been digging up lots of old electronic music fanzines from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Five years ago, I wrote on this blog about Synapse. Here’s a beautiful cover of another zine I’ve been reading recently, from the Basque region of Spain in the mid-1980s.

I’ve been slammed with finishing revisions on entries I wrote for the upcoming edition of The Grove Dictionary of Music, the mammoth and legendary dictionary published by Oxford. I wrote several entries for it–including the definitions of genres like house, electro, and techno. The word “dubstep” is now in the dictionary for the first time, I’m happy to say. I also wrote definitions for a few synthesizers, such as the Roland TB-303 and the TR-808, which will now be in the instruments section for the very first time. The hardest part for me was writing the massive 3,000-word essay on “electronic dance music,” which comprises the past 30+ years of history, and encompasses dozens of genres. (I completely scrapped the entry that was there.) Where do you start and where do you end? What do you include and what do you leave out? Writing definitions isn’t easy, especially when they’re meant to be the definitive ones, and the pay is not great. But it is my hope that by doing this, I can help in some small way to expand the literacy out there about electronic music.

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